The New Pictures

Detective Story (Paramount) is the latest in the current harvest of high-quality movies that have been transplanted from the stage or the library (see CURRENT & CHOICE). Though the film rarely ventures out of the single indoor set that housed Sidney Kingsley's 1949 Broadway hit, Detective Story makes an even better movie than a play.

The picture chronicles a busy day in the detective squad room of a Manhattan station house. The room swirls with traffic: hoodlums, crackpots, mouthpieces, sharpies; the meek, the mulcted, the outraged. The detectives, unlike those in Hollywood's endlessly filmed games of cops & robbers, look like real cops under the strain of a tough, often nasty, grind; they grumble, sweat and suffer.

The one who suffers most is Detective McLeod (Kirk Douglas), a stickler for justice untempered by mercy, who bears down on a confused first offender as sadistically as he hounds a criminal abortionist. His life is dedicated in about equal parts to the remorseless pursuit of wrongdoers and to the love of his young wife (Eleanor Parker). Then he learns that she was one of the abortionist's patients before he married her.

Producer-Director William (The Best Years of Our Lives) Wyler wisely junks the play's long speeches designed to draw parallels between McLeod's rigid zeal and the evils of the police state. Apart from a few other changes to tone down the facts of underworld life, he leaves the play intact, and includes some of its ablest original performers: Lee Grant, hilarious as a man-hungry shoplifter who seems to have stepped right off the subway; Horace McMahon, who makes the squad commander solidly true to life; Joseph Wiseman, playing a degenerate fourth offender with chilling accuracy; and Michael Strong, as Wiseman's slack-jawed crony.

The rest of Detective Story's large cast, featuring William Bendix in a straight role as McLeod's older detective-partner, rounds out a lively gallery of Manhattan squadroom characters. For the first time since Champion, Kirk Douglas gets his teeth into a part tough enough to absorb all his biting intensity. Even more impressive, because it is less expected, is the remarkably well-shaded performance that Director Wyler draws out of Actress Parker in the difficult role of the detective's wife.

Bannerline (MGM) is a limp little melodrama about a brash cub reporter (Keefe Brasselle) who, to cheer up the dying days of an idealistic teacher (Lionel Barrymore), bestirs a town to clean up its gangster-ridden government. Cast inevitably as a crotchety but lovable tyrant, Actor Barrymore gets a chance to play a deathbed scene which, running intermittently through the whole picture, must be the longest on record.

Otherwise, Bannerline is notable only for a distinction that has given a lift to scores of its predecessors on the B-picture assembly line: another fine performance by Character Actor J. Carrol Naish. As he has many times before, Actor Naish plays the menace, an Italian-American gangster. This one takes pride in his rise from a slum to become a silent senior partner of politicians; he has his own sense of fair play as well as foul, and there is enough mellowness in his menace to make him a semicomic figure. Naish's creative playing progressively fills out his sketchy role until the gangster becomes the film's most convincing human being and, curiously, its most likable character.

In his 21-year Hollywood career, Carrol Patrick Sarsfield Joseph Naish, 51, has never once been starred. But he has worked steadily, profitably and to the consistent pleasure of moviegoers in so many films that he has lost count. His conservative guess: 125.

Though he is a native New Yorker of Irish ancestry, his dark eyes, swarthy skin and gift for accents have kept him busiest playing Latin types. He has also appeared as an Englishman, an ape, an old woman, a Swede, a Negro, an Indian, a Japanese, a Malayan, a Chinese, a Pole. On Broadway, before he went to Hollywood, he once played a rabbi in the evening while rehearsing in the afternoon as a Greek gangster. On neither stage nor screen has Naish ever played an Irishman.

Naish entered show business in his teens as a song plugger for Irving Berlin. At 17 he enlisted in World War I, and enjoyed an unruly military career as bombardier, naval orderly and Army machine gunner. After the war he stayed on in Europe, knocking around the Continent as a variety-hall clown and soldier of fortune. The European years fed his talent for mimicry, and left him fluent in five languages and competent in three others. He was on a slow boat to Shanghai when a storm at sea diverted him to Hollywood in 1927. After three years on Broadway and the road, he settled down in the movies.

Twice nominated for an Academy Award (for an Italian soldier in 1943's Sahara and the Mexican father in 1945's A Medal for Benny), Naish has been under contract to a studio only once, to Paramount in 1938. Since then he has freelanced, turning down half a dozen contract offers and as many chances to get star billing. "I like to go after roles," he says, "and when you're under contract, you've got to do what they want you to do." His next part: in RKO's forthcoming Clash by Night, as a plain, unhyphenated American--a major change of pace for Hollywood's one-man U.N.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.