The New Pictures

Salome (Beckworth Corp.; Columbia) tries--with small success--to set the historical record straight on the story of Salome. According to the Biblical version, Princess Salome of Galilee was a willing accomplice in the beheading of John the Baptist because of his preachings against her adulterous mother, Queen Herodias and her stepfather, King Herod. As the movie has it: Salome (Rita Hayworth) was just a nice, healthy girl over whom men lost their heads--figuratively rather than literally. And she danced her famous dance of the seven veils not to lure Herod into serving up the Prophet's head on a platter but merely to distract the King while a handsome Roman commander (Stewart Granger), a secret convert to John's Christian teachings, tried to free him.

Doubtful as history, Salome is just as dubious as screen entertainment. A turgid multimillion-dollar blend of sex, spectacle and religion, it has been directed with a ponderous touch by William Dieterle. Chewing at the Technicolor scenery are Charles Laughton as a fat, licentious Herod, Judith Anderson as an evilly scheming Herodias, Alan Badel as a weirdly wild-eyed John the Baptist, and Stewart Granger as an intrepid Roman commander. Actress Hayworth does her best in the dance of the seven veils. With choreography by Valerie Bettis, Rita is the very picture of a Galilean glamour girl in an off-the-shoulder gown by Jean Louis hairdo by Helen Hunt, and make-up by Clay Campbell. She wriggles, writhes and undulates through this predecessor of the modern striptease with such abandon, as she methodically removes as many veils (six) as the law and the Breen Office will allow, that moviegoers may come away with the feeling that never before has history been so colorful.

I Love Melvin (MGM) is a Technicolored song & dance show with little to offer except the animated presence of Donald O'Connor. Cast as a photographer's brash assistant whose main job is lugging flashbulbs, O'Connor falls head over dancing heels in love with a pretty Broadway chorine (Debbie Reynolds),and boastfully promises to get her picture on the cover of his magazine. For the next several issues, photographs of prizefighters, puppies and horses keep appearing on the magazine cover with increasingly monotonous regularity--but never one of the chorine. Does Debbie ever get to be a cover girl? Does Donald prove that he is no mere flash in the bulb? Do cinemusicals have happy endings?

In the course of I Love Melvin, pert Debbie Reynolds impersonates a football in a gridiron dance number. Donald O Connor does a tap dance on roller skates and goes through some amusing rapid costume changes in a photographer's gallery. But the picture leaves O'Connor's musical-comedy talents largely untapped.

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