The New Pictures

The Student Prince (MGM) goes overbored with too much of everything--songs, singers, CinemaScope, Ansco Color and plot. Apparently not content with the original book and music, Producer Joe Pasternak put his writers to work plastering the story with additional coats of synthetic Teutonic whimsy. He selected Composer Nicholas Brodszky to show Sigmund Romberg how it should have been done by whipping out three new numbers, including an egregious ballad called I'll Walk with God, which is sung with straight-faced solemnity to the corpse of Louis Calhern. Actor Edmund Purdom plays the romantic Prince Karl, but behind Purdom's facial motions is the stentorian voice of Mario Lanza, who is now considered too fat for films. Ann Blyth in blonde braids trills high notes, totes foaming mugs of beer, and bewitches the Heidelberg students.

There are still some nice moments, as when the student chorus breaks into the familiar Drink! Drink! Drink! But the good moments are spaced infrequently in the welter of lackluster dialogue, lackwit comedy and lackadaisical production numbers. After 107 solid minutes of being dazed and deafened, after watching the grandiose piled teeteringly upon the preposterous, moviegoers may conclude that they have spent their time not in unfamiliar Old Heidelberg but right at home in good old Hollywood.

Johnny Guitar (Republic) is one of those curious composite animals, like the tiglon, the hippolope and the peccadillo, that most people would rather talk about than see. This one is a crossbreed of the western with a psychoanalytic case history. Somehow, strains of Greek tragedy, Germanic grand opera and just plain better-class suburban living have also slipped into the mixture.

The story is a series of switches on the old railroad line. The ranchmen don't want the track to cut through their open range. Vienna (Joan Crawford), the madam of a gambling hall and a big land speculator, is understandably all for progress. She hires Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a gunman who has reformed and given up his guns, to defend her financial interests and attack her female susceptibilities.

The main switch: the menace is not a man but a woman (Mercedes McCambridge). What's more, she is not just the usual jealous woman but a real sexo-logical square knot who fondles pistols suggestively and gets unladylike satisfaction from watching a house burn down. In the end it is the women, not the men, who shoot it out, and Mercedes gets her death wish while Joan gets her man.

Actress McCambridge. a talented player with long experience in radio and TV (she won a supporting-actress Oscar in All the King's Men), achieves a believable, blank-mask expression of insanity. The other performers seem bewildered most of the time by the direction of Nicholas Ray (Knock on Any Door, Flying Leathernecks), who works with the misguided brilliance of a myopic Pygmalion. Almost every separate part of the picture comes to life in one way or another, but none quite fits into the whole. At one moment a character is declaiming like a choragus; at the next he may be slanging to beat Broadway. Even the backdrops are out of sorts with one another and with the story. In one scene Frontierswoman Crawford, dressed to the nines in a Paris gown, sits down to a grand piano in a mat-red grotto lit by candelabra, and plunks .away like a cowtown Liberace while the posse thunders toward a sort of sagebrush Goetterdaemmerung.

Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls; Mayer-Kingsley) is a Gallic study of pleasure seen through the magnifying lens of three short stories by Guy de Maupassant.

The Mask plunges abruptly into a nightmare evocation of Parisian gaiety, with pleasure seekers as dazed as opium eaters thronging a ballroom that resounds to the thunder of Gay Nineties music. When a doll-like male dancer collapses amid the frenzy, he is hustled belowstairs to a cubbyhole as though there could be no reminder of human ills at the frolic. A reluctant doctor (Claude Dauphin) is pulled away from a pliant girl to attend the patient and discovers that, under an ingenious, dandified mask, the sick man is an aging wreck. Dauphin takes the broken dancer home and listens reflectively, while the man's equally aged wife alternately complains and boasts about what an incurable roue her husband is. Then Dauphin goes back to the dance.

The Model is less fragmentary and more engrossing. An artist (Daniel Gelin) and a model (Simone Simon) have a passionate affair, set up housekeeping in a beautifully improbable love nest, quarrel and separate. Up until this point, the love story might have been written by Colette, but De Maupassant ends it with the detached irony that is his trademark.

The House of Madame Tellier blends a Rabelaisian humor with an almost feminine delicacy of touch. Madame Tellier's house is a brothel in a small Norman city, and Director Max Ophuls' camera peeks through doors and latticed windows at the girls and their guests, islands of light and laughter in the tomblike silence of the town. Then one night the house is closed tight, and its baffled habitues turn away from the door to wander unhappily in the streets.

Madame and her girls have gone to the country to attend the first Communion of Madame's little niece. The country idyl is charmingly done, with the girls on their best behavior, the villagers impressed by the glamorous visitors from the city, and Madame Tellier (Madeleine Renaud) exhibiting a happy mixture of practicality and sentiment. Jean Gabin, as a shrewd but lovelorn peasant, and Danielle Darrieux, who cries with as much facility as she loves, keeps things going forward. But. like most weekends in the country, this one tends to drag a little on Sunday afternoon.

The Saracen Blade (Columbia) suggests that Hollywood may be getting as tired of making historical pictures as many moviegoers are of looking at them. Using plenty of stock shots and operating on a low budget, the film goes on a foot-dragging Technicolor pilgrimage through 13th century Italy, with a side trip to the Holy Land for one of the skimpiest Crusades in filmland history. Ricardo Montalban plays the peasant hero who does battle with evil barons, cruel Saracens and assorted charmers, including Betta St. John and blonde Carolyn Jones, a graduate of TV's Dragnet. Despite the costumes, the atmosphere is more that of the Middle West than the Middle Ages, just as the plot has more in it of cops & robbers than of the age of chivalry.

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