The New Pictures

It Should Happen to You (Columbia).

Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) is a nobody with an all too mortal longing to be a Somebody. Fired from her job in a Manhattan garment mine, she heads for Central Park to have a daydream of grandeur. Wistfully she gazes at a big, empty billboard on Columbus Circle, imagining how her name would look there in 12-ft. letters: GLADYS GLOVER. What happens next is a hilarious example of dumb-blonde logic. Since her name would look wonderful on the sign, and since she has $1,000 in the bank, why not rent the sign and put her name on it? She does--and nothing happens. Then everything begins to happen at once. A dashing young soap millionaire (Peter Lawford) dashes after her, demanding her billboard at several times the rent and her body at any price short of matrimony. Before Gladys is through, she has parlayed her single billboard into six strategically located billboards in midtown Manhattan.

Soon the whole town is talking about the "mystery girl." Crowds mob her in Macy's, TV types paw her, the soap man bills her in a big ad campaign as "the average American girl," the Air Force hails her as "The Girl We'd Most Like to Be Up in the Air With." Gladys has at last become a Somebody. But there is a moral: a Somebody is sometimes only a nobody that everybody has heard about. With this thought in her pretty head, she is patiently led away by the boy (Jack Lemmon) she has really loved all along.

The comedy situation is worked for all the laughs it's worth by Scripter Garson Kanin and Director George Cukor. It gets more from the faultlessly schooled comedy of Actress Holliday and a fresh, sharply timed performance by Actor Lemmon, making his screen debut.

In It Should Happen to You, Judy plays, for the fourth time in a row, essentially the same poor man's Pygmalion that won her an Oscar two years ago for the screen version of her 1946 Broadway hit, Born Yesterday. Practice has made her almost perfect in the part. She seems an incarnation of the big-city blonde who is so dumb that she doesn't even know she's beautiful.

All this makes a little masterpiece of Judy's big seduction scene, in which she drifts dazedly down the old millstream of her instincts (absentmindedly slipping off her shoes and undoing an earring), right to the crucial point when she remembers that Lawford had billed her as "the average American girl," who shouldn't be doing such things. Nevertheless, Judy is so good at this one role that it would be interesting to see her play another one.

Man in the Attic (20th Century-Fox). Jack (Shane) Palance is a movie heavy so heavy that he makes Jack the Ripper seem no more than a sort of lovable nuisance on a late date. In this picture, in fact, he literally does just that. Director Hugo Fregonese lets himself get caught between his old-fashioned devil (the screenplay is based on Marie Belloc Lowndes's 1913 thriller, The Lodger) and the deep blue sea of modern psychiatric interpretation.

As a result, the audience is asked more often to sympathize with the killer's hidden motives than to feel horror for what he is up to.

Fortunately, Actor Palance is too convincing a rat to be completely immobilized in this dramatic mousetrap. He makes his audience understand not only why he went mad but something of how it feels to be that way; and when at last he deliberately quenches his blazing life in the Thames, the scamp in every moviegoer is both chastened and given its due respect.

Some of the minor parts are also feelingly played. Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams, especially, provide more than comic relief: their downstairs charm is a real dramatic foil for the insanity in the attic. Isabel Jewell is touching as one of the Ripper's victims. The musicomedy scenes in black and white are wittier and sexier than most of those seen recently in color. But the picture belongs to Palance.

He takes it over with his talent for drawing the spectator down into his private whirlpool.

Knights of the Round Table (M-G-M), in which Metro takes up the Arthurian legend where Tennyson left off, is one of 1954's first big quests for the box-office Grail. The cup should soon be running over. Like MGM's last two spectacular hits, Quo Vadis and Ivanhoe, it has all the proven elements of success--famous names, a famous title, Technicolor--and CinemaScope too.

The scriptwriters (Talbot Jennings, Jan Lustig and Noel Langley) did a pretty clever job of forcing the huge, loose body of the saga into a kind of literary iron maiden: the subject is murdered, but the movie is kept in shape--even though it does run scoundrelly long (115 minutes).

The picture begins with Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone, continues through his meeting with Lancelot, his triumph over Modred, the marriage to Guinevere, the making of the Table Round, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, their exposure by Modred and the consequent ruin of the state, Arthur's death at the "last, dim, weird battle of the west." and Lancelot's revenge on the villain of the piece. Every turn of the tale is contested with swordplay so dashing that the broadsword may for a time replace the rocket pistol in the age group to which this picture is supremely well-suited.

Robert Taylor, who helped make the studio so much money as Ivanhoe, should make it even more as Lancelot, even though his strength in the rough & tumble scenes is obviously as the strength of one.

Ava Gardner, as proud Guinevere, leans from a casement in a way that explains a lot of things the ancient lays left unexplained. Mel Ferrer, as King Arthur, is the only figure in the film who rises easily to the epic elevation, and thus strongly suggests what might have been done with this picture if a little imagination had been spent on it. As is, it is a flashily entertaining, double-width comic strip.

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