The New Pictures

The Detective (Facet; Columbia). The priest as the detective--symbolizing consecrated good against dedicated evil--appealed to G. K. Chesterton's keen sense of antithesis, and in the Father Brown stories he rammed the paradox, like an intellectual skeleton, through some otherwise flabby fiction. In this movie based on the stories, the intellectual skeleton is removed, and the film falls all of a sentimental heap.

The script puts Father Brown (Alec Guinness) up to his usual trick of bringing a criminal not to the judicial bar but to the communion rail. His prospective proselyte : a famous international crook called Flambeau (Peter Finch). The cunning old fisher of men lets the devil bait the hook--with a pretty widow (Joan Greenwood). Widows, as somebody in the picture remarks, are irresistible because "if you are better than the first [husband], they are grateful, and if you are worse, they are not surprised."

For the first five minutes Actor Guin ness has a splendid whack at Chesterton's old dear: egg on the cassock, shy peer over specks askew, sedentary hobble, sly little grin. But in the long run, it becomes painfully clear that while Comedian Guinness can do no wrong as a sanctimonious rogue (The Lavender Hill Mob, The Captain's Paradise), it is just about impossible to do right by a roguish saint.

Phffft! (Columbia) is the sound made by an expiring match--the kind that gutters out in gossip columns. "Don't say it," runs the sales slogan for the picture, "see it!" The advice is sensible.

Judy Holliday is a Connecticut-style

Blondie, Jack Lemmon her disinterested Dagwood. and everything goes phffft! one night because of the leer that crawls over Jack's face as he wallows through a whodunit, where it describes how "she began, one button at a time, to undo the front of her sweater . . ." Judy flounces off to get a divorce; Jack takes up bachelor quarters with a friend (Jack Carson).

Carson gets Lemmon a date with something "basic" (Kim Novak), who gives him that little-girl look, confides that she almost went to college and majored in music -- "I was a drum majorette." Meanwhile, Judy has an experience with a charm boy (Donald Curtis) who asks her up to his "an teem" apartment. Jack enters a painting class, sprouts a moustache and buys a lima bean-shaped sports-car. So it goes, and very merrily indeed, until separate existence is just too much to wrestle with, and Judy and Jack get a firm new wedlock on each other.

All three principals--Holliday, Lemmon and Carson--have spent so much of their acting careers in the straitjacket of formula farce that they wear it like high-fashion undies. Carson is a very slick comedian; his expression, as he muses on the possibilities of a round bed, could hardly have been improved on by W. C. Fields. Holliday and Lemmon, after only two pictures together, must be acknowledged as the smoothest new comedy team in show business. A nice bit: Holliday, slopping together an amateur Martini for Carson, says anxiously, "I probably bruised the gin." Carson looks. "Not a mark on it," he says heartily.

Crest of the Wave (M-G-M). Dancer Gene Kelly makes millions for his studio with his musicals, and when he chooses to give his feet a rest, his histrionic head makes pretty good sense too. In 1950 he threw all his sane, straight self into a sane, straight part, was one of the, big things that made Black Hand one of the best "little pictures" of the year. In Crest of the Wave he has done it again.

Based on a play by Hugh Hastings, Crest tells the plain tale of a minor scientific project set up by the British navy. A dozen officers and men, including three from the U.S. Navy, are sent to a rocky outcrop off the British coast with orders to develop a torpedo that will carry a new and highly sensitive explosive. As the camera grinds away at men and officers, it also grinds into the moviegoer's face the long, quiet pain of existing beneath a higher purpose. The work consoles what the isolation irks in the characters, but between the two, they swing in the nervous, short moods of men without women.

Throughout most of the picture, the upper lip is held so stiff that one often wishes the characterization behind it had more teeth. But it is a good, workmanlike film, nevertheless, and Actor Kelly attains that rare thing in Hollywood movies about Americans in England: he indicates his Americanism without lapsing into an inane grin.

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