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The Desert Song (Warner) is the third major film version of Sigmund Romberg's old (1926) operetta.-- This time Crooner Gordon MacRae is cast in the dual lead.

By day he is a serious, bespectacled student of anthropology. By night he is El Khobar, dashing leader of the Riffs, who is thwarting villainous Sheik Raymond Massey's plans to oust the French from Morocco. As El Khobar, he also makes ardent musical love to Kathryn Grayson, the pretty daughter of a French general.

This Technicolored Desert Song is full of singing legionnaires, dancing girls, spies, and burnoosed and turbaned fighting men.

But the picture seems unable to make up its mind whether to play it straight or kid the whole thing. Even in this arid adaptation, however, The Desert Song's famed score (The Riff Song, Romance, One Alone) keeps its melodic bloom.

Cry of the Hunted (M-G-M), a swampy little chase yarn set in the Louisiana bayous, has to do with a cop (Barry Sullivan) pursuing an escaped convict (Vittorio Gassman). Inevitably in such a setting, there are a couple of alligator and quicksand sequences. There is also some bogged-down dialogue, e.g., "I know why your eyes are at half-mast--your brain is dead."

* Previously filmed in 1929 with John Boles, in 1943 with Dennis Morgan.

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