The New Pictures

How to Marry a Millionaire (20th Century-Fox) is the second picture produced in CinemaScope--the wide-screen process that made The Robe look, in the studio's ledger as well as in the public's eye, like a huge, animated dollar bill. HTMAM might be said to cover the other side of the currency. Where The Robe, a Biblical epic, was dominated by the personable male heads of Richard Burton, Michael Rennie and Victor Mature, its successor is a light comedy devoted to a close inspection of three famous girls.

Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe, cast as three little lovebirds in search of a gilded cage, decide that the best way to catch a millionaire is to set a trap. They set one, accordingly, in a sublet apartment on Manhattan's Sutton Place--a happy hunting ground for mink, the script says--and bait it with everything they've got, which is mostly cheesecake. Millionaires apparently like the bait as well as most fellows, and pretty soon they are wolfing away at the door. In the end, of course, the filthy lucre loses out to nice, clean sex, and everybody goes to bed instead of to Bergdorf's. But while it lasts, the gold rush is rowdy, irreverent, and sprinkled with belly laughs.

As the mainspring of the mantrap, Lauren Bacall is the least convincing of the three. She does her work with a reptile eye and a cold, slit grin. Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand, is pert and comfortable as a not-so-dumb blonde who doesn't like to wear glasses for fear men won't make passes. Betty Grable, a performer who has always appeared to have just about as much above the eyebrows as below, carries off the show with such scenes as the one in which she arrives with her millionaire friend at his "lodge" in Maine and stammers in baby-blue-eyed amazement, "But where are all the Elks?"

The important thing about the picture, however, is the proof it offers that CinemaScope can do the comic about as well as it can the epic. The problem of pictorial composition within the stretched-out frame is fairly well handled, chiefly by making the actors move more and the camera less. The cutting from one scene to another is a little heavyhanded, but the eye soon learns to allow for it, and the light skip from scene to scene, so necessary in comedy, does not seriously falter.

In providing a second superproduction to follow up its first. Fox has made a strong lead to take the next trick in the big game now being played for the entertainment dollar. If HTMAM is a grandscale success, the other Hollywood studios will probably have to trump, or follow Fox's suit.

The Glass Web (Universal-International) succeeds in covering up its basic dullness by skillfully using a couple of cinematic dirty words: adultery and TV.

John Forsythe, the writer of a television program called Crime of the Week, falls into the habit of fooling around with a blonde (Kathleen Hughes) instead of going dutifully home in the late afternoon. When he tries to break the habit, the blonde breaks the bad news: she wants $2,500 or she will tell his wife. The night of the payoff the blonde has a run-in with two other men--her husband (John Verros) and the head researcher of the writer's program (Edward G. Robinson), another of the many beaux to her string. Early next morning the dame is found dead.

From there on out, any experienced moviegoer will know that: i) the murder will be chosen as "Crime of the Week"; 2) the writer and the researcher will reveal their intimacy with the deceased by curious slips in the course of the program; and 3) the murderer will finally be trapped into confessing his crime before a television camera he does not know to be "live." Nevertheless, the film (owing something to the superior mystery novel by Max Simon Ehrlich on which it is based) at times conveys amusingly how life looks through the other end of the television tube. And in Actor Forsythe, now playing in the Broadway hit, The Teahouse of the August Moon, it has a fine, melancholy hero.

Calamity Jane (Warner) is a good picture to come in late on. In that way the moviegoer can hear a little amiable shouting by Doris Day and Howard Keel, soak up some pleasant Technicolor, and leave under the illusion that the yammering chaos of the plot is put in order by something he missed in the first reel. (It is not.)

The big idea, apparently, was to send yet another dog after the scraps from Annie Get Your Gun's box-office banquet. Instead of Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill, the lovers in this opus are Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, together with such a subsidiary tangle of interlocking triangles that the audience may need a logarithm table to figure it all out.

At any rate, Singer Keel (who played in the screen version of Annie Get Your Gun) knows how to saddle up his songs and ride them for all they're worth--which, in this case, is not much. Songstress Day, as Calamity, is clearly aiming at the Ethel Merman manner. But where husky Ethel, with her large-bore bellow, can roar out a song until her throat fairly smokes, dainty Doris is more like a Girl Scout with a shiny new Daisy: she's loaded, but hardly for bear.

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