The New Pictures

Actors and Sin (Sid Kuller; United Artists) is a two-part picture of mixed merits from one-man Moviemaker Ben Hecht, who produced, directed and wrote the screenplay. Hecht's eight-year-old daughter Jenny makes her screen debut in a leading role.

The first episode, Actor's Blood, is a rather anemic whodunit about the murder of an unpleasant stage actress (Marsha Hunt) whose ham-actor father (Edward G. Robinson) stages a dinner party to which he invites all the suspects. Except for the solution, there are few surprises in this piece of old-fashioned mummery.

With the next episode, called A Woman of Sin, Hecht moves more successfully from the area of theatrical cloak & dagger to cinematic tongue in cheek. A Woman of Sin is the title of a trashy novel which is turned into an Academy Award-contending movie without the studio's discovering until too late that the author of this "great story of animal love" is a precocious, pixyish nine-year-old girl. As the beribboned, towheaded authoress, Jenny Hecht takes smoothly to her father's direction. Also participating in this fancifully frothy lampoon of Hollywood: Alan Reed as a porcine movie mogul, Eddie Albert as a double-talking agent, and Tracey Roberts as his sexy secretary.

Young Man with Ideas (MGM) would seem to be a misnomer for Actor Glenn Ford in this harebrained little comedy. Ford plays a Milquetoastish Montana lawyer who migrates to Los Angeles with his wife (Ruth Roman) and three children. There he finds himself preparing for the California bar examination with blonde Fellow Student Nina Foch, who has a habit of boning up on criminal law while attired in off-the-shoulder lounging pajamas. There is also Denise Darcel, an amorous French nightclub singer who wears low-cut dresses and is under the impression that Ford is a talent scout.

To complicate matters further, Ford and his family have moved into a bungalow that was once a bookie joint. The lawyer winds up in a nightclub brawl with mobsters, but does such a masterful job of defending himself in court that he wins an acquittal. He also passes the bar examination and wins a 34th partnership in a Los Angeles law firm. Ruth Roman sums it all up when she says at one point: "We never should have left Montana."

California Conquest (Columbia). Between 1825 and 1841, Mexico-ruled California was torn by internal strife, and Russia, France, England and the U.S. were trying to take over the territory. Dramatizing this little-known phase of history, California Conquest adds a dash of Technicolor and several dashes of dramatic license to the facts. Cornel Wilde is a romantic Spanish don who is in favor of U.S. annexation. To prevent the Russians from worming their way into the orange groves, he and tomboyish Teresa Wright work their way into the bandit forces of toothy, grinning Alfonso Bedoya, who is in the pay of Czarist agents.

What results is a sort of opera bouffe war between brigands and rancheros, replete with swordplay, gunplay, stagecoach chases and hand-to-hand encounters in wine cellars. At one juncture in the fighting, one bandit remarks: "I don't know how long we can keep this up--we're running out of powder." Fortunately, the picture runs out of plot soon afterwards, because Wilde has eliminated most of the Russian forces, thereby paving the way for U.S. annexation of California--and for his own annexation of Teresa Wright.

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