The New Pictures

The Racers (20th Century-Fox). A European tour can go pretty fast these days, but this is probably the first time the whole continent ever rushed by in such a hurry that it could not be seen with the naked eye. France, Germany, Belgium, the Riviera. Italy--it's all there. One by one the scenic glories and the cultural wonders flash like giant postcards, lustrous with color by De Luxe, upon the CinemaScope screen.

In the foreground are the Italian bolidi--Alfa-Romeos, Ferraris, Maseratis--here and there a Mercedes and a Gordini; much elegant metal and, no doubt, to fanciers of horsepower, a sight prettier than slow old Europe. The racing scenes, in fact, are among the most frantic ever filmed. As the little red devils scream the curves and hellbat the straightaway, nose to rump of the car ahead, hot and light on the track as grits in a frying pan, the customer sits spang on the front axle--and sweats. Once in a while Kirk Douglas climbs out of his Ferrari and into bed with Bella Darvi. Kirk's problem in this picture seems to be: Which has the more exciting clutch? He seems to prefer the Ferrari, even though Actress Darvi offers a splendid sample of what one character frankly describes as "independent front suspension."

Prince of Players (20th Century-Fox) is apparently the result of an ingenious calculation that, since the CinemaScope screen is twice as wide as the normal one, two pictures can be shown on it at once.

Movie No. 1 is the film biography of the Booths, the brilliant theatrical family that produced in Edwin Booth the man often called "the greatest American actor," and in his brother, John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. The story begins with Edwin (Richard Burton) as a boy of eleven already playing the nurse to his father, Junius Brutus Booth (Raymond Massey), a magnificent ruin, mad at least north-northwest and crazy for drink at all points of the compass, as he careers across the wilderness to be Hamlet in mining camps. Richard to the river towns, and Lear to the field mice that scamper in his tousled wits.

Massey, an old ham in his own right, is marvelous as the grand old ham. Furthermore, the tendency to spasmodic delivery in long speeches that has marred most Massey readings in the past, is scarcely felt in this one; when he leaves the picture, a third of the way through, the heart somehow goes out of it with him.

Actor Burton, the young British player who made his first big U.S. success in The Robe, does his best, which is never less than vivid, to sustain the early tone; and Moss Hart's script lends him a hand. Drama strides the scene: Is the son as mad as the father? Love (Maggie McNamara) walks in, to soothe his fevered brow. And just when the action has settled down to a nice homey drone of hysteria, almost as dull as Saturday night in Bedlam--bang! Brother John (John Derek) puts a bullet into Abraham Lincoln, and the public takes its revenge on Edwin with a full barrage--of vegetables. *

Movie No. 2 is an anthology of about 20 famous scenes from Shakespeare, most of them grossly overplayed. Actor Burton shows a pretty talent--though not exactly for Shakespeare. In almost every scene, this onetime junior colleague of Laurence Olivier in London's Old Vic company does more a parody of his senior than an imitation of life.

Curiously, the picture's faults fade beneath the glaze of its magnificent production. Moss Hart has woven his garland of Shakespearean forget-me-nots with the banal dexterity of a professional cigar-wrapper; Director Philip Dunne has managed to make most of his actors overplay their parts to the same degree. The color is creamy, the camera expert, the cutting shrewd. In fact, as is the case with many Fox pictures during CinemaScope's first year, a mediocre idea (and often it has been a downright bad one) has been made into a piece of gleamingly proficient, machine-tooled entertainment.

The Belles of St. Trinian's (Launder-Gilliat; Associated Artists) are the female objects depicted in Ronald Searle's well-known cartoons on the subject of Regressive Education in Britain (TIME, Sept. 20). St. Trinian's, on the screen as in the scribbles, is a finishing school with a difference: it is not the students but the teachers who get finished. The school motto: In Flagranti Delicto. The curriculum offers a wide selection of illiberal arts and quite a few handy crafts. In chemistry, for instance, some of the younger girls make a still. Its product is properly bottled, labeled ("St. Trinian's Gin") and distributed by a local bootlegger (George Cole) who is also on the payroll as the school bookmaker and general spiv. Nitroglycerin is also concocted, but not often used. Arson is discouraged unless the school buildings that are burned happen also to be insured.

At hockey the St. Trinian's girls literally wipe up the field with their opponents, and yet the indoor sports--dropping a battle-ax on an unwary master, stretching an informer on a homemade rack--are more popular. The teaching staff, like the student body, has been formed on St. Trinian's Law: survival of the misfittest. The headmistress herself, a sort of middle-aged Wedgwood sylph with a shifty eye and just the faintest mustache (the part is played by Alastair Sim), is not above "borrowing" her pupils' pocket money, and the rest of the staff is best known by the faculty room it keeps. "It smells," a visitor remarks, "like a powder room in Port Said."

During the period examined by this film, the girls go so far, in an attempt to win a horse race on which their bank roll is riding, as to steal the favorite and hide him in their dormitory. "Girls, girls!" the headmistress exclaims. "How often have I told you that pets are not allowed?" What really worries her is that, for some reason, the local cops have secretly planted a police spy (Joyce Grenfell) on her staff; if the horse theft were discovered, it might give the school a bad name, and besides, her own bank roll happens to be riding on that very horse.

* In real life they were mostly vegetables of the mind. The day after Lincoln died, Edwin Booth, who was playing Hamlet in Boston, was kicked out of the theater. Threatening letters ("Revolvers are loaded with which to shoot you down") crammed his mailbox. For some weeks he dared not show his face on the street; for nine months he dared not show it on the stage. Booth eventually lived the scandal down, but he never got over the shock of it; from that day till his death he refused to play in Washington.

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