The New Pictures

Titanic (20th Century-Fox) dramatizes the greatest of modern maritime disasters: the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912, with a loss of 1,513 lives. Around this celebrated tragedy, Titanic weaves a less than epic story that involves an assortment of fictional shipboard characters: a middle-aged couple (Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck) fighting over the upbringing of their children; a collegian (Robert Wagner) in love with the daughter (Audrey Dalton); an unfrocked priest (Richard Basehart), a wealthy, wisecracking American widow (Thelma Ritter).

Though glossily put together and smoothly acted (particularly by Clifton Webb as a tart-tongued socialite), these melodramatic vignettes are merely a ripple on the picture's main theme: the sinking of an ocean liner. Unfortunately, too much time is spent on contrived fiction, too little on dramatic fact.

Most impressive scene: the climactic sequence as the ship strikes a submerged iceberg, and approximately two hours later sinks ponderously into a calm, moonlit, icy sea, while those left on the doomed vessel sing Nearer My God to Thee.

Man on a Tightrope (20th Century-Fox) plays out a thin story against a colorfully realistic background. The picture is adapted from Neil Paterson's 1953 novel of the same name which was loosely based on a 1950 real-life incident of a circus crossing the border from East to West Germany. As scripted by Robert Sherwood, the movie tells of a small circus which makes a run for freedom from Red Czechoslovakia to the American zone of West Germany.

Directed by Elia (A Streetcar Named

Desire) Kazan, the picture makes good use of its actual German backgrounds and its bizarre circus setting. But the characters are mostly sawdust figures in a stock movie melodrama. Fredric March, as the circus manager and clown tightrope-walker, gives an earnest performance that seems to recall a little too strongly his confused Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Terry Moore as his bareback-riding daughter and Cameron Mitchell as a circus handyman in love with her are merely displaced Hollywood juveniles. Gloria Grahame as the circus manager's sultry young wife and Adolphe Menjou as a secret-police officer carry more conviction, but the best performances are bits, e.g., Alex D'Arcy as a fatuously handsome lion tamer, Hansi as a circus dwarf, Dorothea Wieck as an equestrienne.

Tautest sequence: the circus' climactic race across the guarded border in broad daylight. Under the guise of giving a parade, the whole ramshackle outfit tumbles past police watchtowers and barbed wire barricades in a helter-skelter jumble of sentry gunfire, jugglers, acrobats, clowns, performing dogs, ponies, elephants and lumbering circus wagons. At this point, the picture takes on a movingly nightmarish quality.

Pony Express (Nat Holt; Paramount) finds the U.S. mails--as well as the familiar old horse-opera plot--coming through on schedule, in Technicolor. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (Charlton Heston) triumphs over weather, topography, and assorted man-made obstacles to inaugurate the Pony Express' pioneer mail service from St. Joseph, Mo. to Sacramento, Calif, in 1860. When Cody is not battling hostile redskins, he whiles away the time with an affectionate redhead (Rhonda Fleming) and an even more affectionate blonde

(Jan Sterling). But, true to horse-opera tradition, in the last reel he chooses his horse.

Pony Express has a good deal of molasses-slow dialogue, but it offers some fast riding and straight shooting. Cody kills an Indian chief in a vicious battle with tomahawk and hunting knife. He shoots it out with perfidious white men, among them foreign agents trying to move into California, rebellious Californians opposed to the Pony Express linking them to the Union, and saboteurs who do not want to give up profitable government mail contracts to the Pony Express. During those few intervals when Cody is reloading his guns or dallying with Rhonda or Jan, another colorful frontier figure, Wild Bill Hickok (Forrest Tucker), is conveniently around to take over in the six-shooter routines.

The Glass Wall (Columbia) is a standard chase yarn whose only novel ingredient is a United Nations backdrop. A European stowaway (Vittorio Gassman) jumps ship in New York harbor and hopes to stay in the U.S. The one person who can help him in his quest for citizenship is a former U.S. paratrooper, now a jazz-band clarinetist, whose life he saved during World War II. Since this is a movie, the fugitive manages in the course of 24 hours, while eluding police and immigration authorities, to charm a couple of glamour girls, a down & out waitress (Gloria Grahame) and a burlesque dancer (Robin Raymond), who help him in his hunt for the paratrooper.

Filmed largely around New York, the picture has some real-looking settings for its frequently farfetched doings. As the chase leads to the United Nations Displaced Persons Commission in the glass-walled U.N. Secretariat Building, there is some discussion of human rights and man's inhumanity to man. But this high-flown talk is never seriously allowed to interfere with the overblown melodrama.

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