The New Pictures

Carrie (Paramount) brings Theodore Dreiser's massive, muddy, turn-of-the-century novel, Sister Carrie, to the screen for the first time* in a polished, rather tidied-up movie version. The film is generally faithful to Dreiser's story about Carrie Meeber (Jennifer Jones), an innocent farm girl who comes to Chicago in 1898 and gets involved with two men: Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert), a good-natured traveling salesman with whom she lives, and George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier), a prosperous restaurant manager who gives up family and career for her, and ends up a bum and a suicide.

The movie catches much of the emotional power of the novel in William (Detective Story) Wyler's sustained direction and in its intense performances.

As Carrie, Jennifer Jones seems to have stepped right out of the pages of the book: she is shallow and pleasure-loving, but cleverer and more imaginative than either of her lovers, both of whom she outgrows. In his first Hollywood movie since That Hamilton Woman (1941), Laurence Olivier is a bit too elegant as Restaurantman Hurstwood, but he plays a tricky role with grace and restrained passion. In lesser parts, Eddie Albert is often overly bumpkinish as the traveling salesman, but Miriam Hopkins is a convincingly shrewish Mrs. Hurstwood.

In the process of being translated to the screen, Carrie has lost not only the Sister from its title, but also some of its biting naturalism and sociological compassion. Hurstwood's suicide is only suggested in the film. Gone entirely is the harrowing trolley-car strike in which the down & out Hurstwood worked as a strikebreaking conductor; and almost all the flophouse and begging sequences have been deleted. Dreiser set off his small people with large philosophizing about the moral hypocrisy of the times, but the movie is mostly just about small people. Although it hews to Dreiser's somber story with honesty and artistry, Carrie lacks the novel's richly realistic "tangle of human life."

Diplomatic Courier (20th Century-Fox) gets off to a fast start with some semidocumentary shots--directed by old semidocumentary hand Henry ( The House on 92nd Street) Hathaway--on the latest technological devices by which the U.S. State Department keeps in touch with its far-flung outposts.

Unhappily, the picture soon digresses from lively realism to lagging melodramatics. Tyrone Power is a topflight U.S. diplomatic courier bound from Paris for Salzburg to pick up secret documents from another courier. To make sure that he is on schedule, Power wears two wrist watches. The picture also allows him two beautiful girls--a mink-coated American minx (Patricia Neal) and a blonde European charmer (Hildegarde Neff).

Also mixed up in the plot are Soviet agents, U.S. Army counterintelligence and a vital bit of microfilm. Power is shot, stabbed, drugged by Communist spies, tossed into a river, thrown down steep steps and knocked out three times, all without damage to his timepieces. The picture has some interesting glimpses of Salzburg and Trieste, photographed on the spot, but most of the chases--by plane, train, automobile and on foot--are routine. By the fadeout, it has long been obvious that this particular diplomatic courier is traveling a well-worn movie-melodrama route, and that his diplomatic pouch contains nothing more momentous than a class-B screenplay.

Robin Hood (Walt Disney; RKO Radio) again fights for king, country and fair Maid Marian (Joan Rice) in a first-rate, all-live-action Walt Disney production. This Technicolored version of the old legend is a flavorful blend of fast movement, robust acting and authentic atmosphere, photographed in real English settings.

Robin Hood (Richard Todd) and his merry men in Lincoln green are still roaming the bosky shades of Sherwood Forest, eating sweet venison, quaffing sparkling ale, and speeding their grey-goose shafts with skill and cunning. And when King Richard the Lionhearted (Patrick Barr) goes off to the Crusades, and his villainous brother Prince John (Hubert Gregg) and the scurvy sheriff of Nottingham (Peter Finch) try to usurp the throne, Robin and his men engage these medieval hoods in many a stout bout to the twang of bowstrings and the knock of cudgels.

In the title role, Richard Todd is neither so athletic as Douglas Fairbanks was in 1922 nor so dashing as Errol Flynn in 1938; but he is a bold, bouncing and right jolly fellow, who is more faithful to the "beardless whelp" of tradition than were his screen predecessors. He is surrounded by a group of stalwart character actors: James Robertson Justice as Little John; James Hayter as portly Friar Tuck; Martita Hunt as Queen Eleanor; Elton Hayes as the roving minstrel Allan-a-Dale; Hal Osmond as Midge the Miller; Anthony Forwood as Will Scarlet. Even the production credits have a Robin-Hoodish lilt: Producer Perce Pearce, Director Ken Annakin, Cameraman Guy Green.

* Censorship troubles dogged Dreiser's first novel from the beginning. When the wife of Publisher Frank Doubleday read the manuscript, she was so shocked by its frankness that the first edition of the book was never circulated. Though several movie studios were interested in Sister Carrie from time to time, it was thumbed down by the Production Code Administration because it was a story of a kept woman. It was also considered "too gloomy" to be good box office. RKO bought Sister Carrie in 1940 from Dreiser, but never got around to making a movie of it. In 1947, Paramount bought the book from RKO at the request of Director William Wyler.

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