The New Pictures

Invitation (M-G-M), based on a story by Jerome Weidman, bears an astonishing resemblance to Henry James's chilling classic, The Wings of the Dove. Like James's Milly, Dorothy McGuire is a poor little rich girl doomed to an early death from an incurable heart ailment, and her plight provides an opportunity for a pair of fortune hunters. When the film opens, Dorothy--unaware that she has only a few months to live--is being showered with expensive gifts by her grieving father, Louis Calhern, and with little attentions by her husband, Van Johnson. Between presents, everyone keeps telling her to lie down and take things easy.

At this point, Invitation plunges into a series of flashbacks that slowly convince Dorothy that she is not only doomed but duped. She discovers that her husband was hired by her father to marry her; that the other woman (Ruth Roman) expects Van back as soon as she is dead; that even her faithful maid has another job ready & waiting the moment the funeral is over. These scenes, painstakingly written by Playwright Paul Osborn (On Borrowed Time, Point of No Return), have a certain effectiveness, but it is eventually canceled out by a slick reconciliation and by the offstage presence of a Hollywooden surgeon who knows just how to operate to save Dorothy's life.

For the most part, Director Gottfried Reinhardt keeps his film from bogging down in sentimentality. He gets expert help from his cast: as the heiress, Dorothy McGuire manages a nice mixture of frailty and charm; Van Johnson is surprisingly believable as the cad who falls in with a plot only to fall in love with his wife.

Scandal Sheet (Columbia] takes a faded leaf out of such newspaper melodramas as Five Star Final (1931) and Gentlemen of the Press (1929). Reporter John Derek never takes off his hat, scoops not only the opposition but also the cops; ruthless Editor Broderick Crawford prints anything to get a rise out of his circulation. Together they turn a staid Manhattan daily (U.S. election headline: MR. DEWEY DEFEATED) into a rag that thrives on blood, cheesecake and tears.

Then Editor Crawford bumps off his wife.* Despite all he can do to cover his trail without arousing suspicion, it is Newshawk Derek's brilliant hunches and painstaking detective work that finally expose Crawford on his own gaudy front page--and push newsstand sales higher than ever.

The kind of newspaper pictured in Scandal Sheet was topical 25 years ago, when the film's plot might also have seemed fresher. Nothing is as dead as yesterday's newspaper, but yesteryear's newspaper melodrama comes close.

Boots Malone (Columbia) is a horse-racing movie, sired by any of a dozen others and damned by the resemblance. It tells of a jockey agent (William Holden), tarnished and down on his luck, and a runaway rich boy (Johnny Stewart) who wants desperately to be a winning jockey; of the race track's poverty-row "characters" who chip in to buy a potential champion; of the crooked gamblers whose attempt to fix the big race through Holden conflicts at the last moment with his fatherly affection for the boy.

On this too familiar track, the movie nevertheless shows fairly good form. Avoiding the handicap of a love story, Producer-Scripter Milton Holmes has sparked the film with well-shot racing scenes, and given it some seemingly authentic paddock lore and lingo. Though somewhat young for his role, Actor Holden plays it with his usual skill, and Boots Malone also benefits from an earnest performance--his first in movies--by Broadway's 15-year-old Johnny (The King and I) Stewart.

Japanese War Bride (Joseph Bernhard; 20th Century-Fox) is a skin-deep drama about the difficulties of a Tokyo nurse (Japan's Shirley Yamaguchi) who goes to live among California lettuce growers as the wife of an unbelievably naive Korean War veteran (Don Taylor). To Taylor's surprise, the folks at home do not warm up readily to his bride. She is patronized, insulted, finally slandered by a jealous in-law (Marie Windsor) in a poison-pen letter accusing her of an affair with a local Nisei farmer.

Actress Yamaguchi is pretty in a surprisingly conventional Hollywood way, and so, despite its theme of racial tension, is Japanese War Bride. The movie proves notable in only one respect: in the past, the screen's racially mixed love stories have led at least one of the partners to no good end. In Producer Joseph Bernhard's switch on Madame Butterfly, the lovers manage to live happily ever after.

*In real life, Charles Chapin, city editor of the New York Evening World, went to Sing Sing in 1919 for the same crime.

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