The New Pictures

To Catch a Thief (Paramount). Grace Kelly and Cary Grant are sitting in a a runabout at a secluded spot high above the Technicolored Riviera. Radiant Grace turns to Gary, says: "Do you want a breast or a leg?" Gary locks eyeballs with Grace and after a moment replies:

I'll leave the choice to you." So Grace gives Gary a piece of fried chicken. This is the sort of meal Director Alfred (Rear Window) Hitchcock cooked up for his troupe in the south of France last year. Its a little overdone, but it's still fried chicken-- or maybe even just a lark. Those ingenious instants of terror for which Hitchcock is so well known are missing. But there remains the familiar Hitchcock pace and wit, the easy salability of such stars as Kelly and Grant, solid supporting performances by Jessie Royce Landis and John Williams, and lingering views of the Riviera.

As the good guy, Actor Grant never had it so good. He is an American, a reformed jewel thief, known in his day as "The Cat." Now retired, he lives cool and easy on the rocks, puttering about a villa. Then comes trouble. The police suspect that he is responsible for a batch of jewel robberies. To prove his innocence, he must uncover the real villain.

Grace Kelly, naturally, is a wealthy young American woman who finally decides she wants to be The Cat's meow.

She performs ably, pouting around and dressing like a billion francs. When it comes to making love, Grace knows how to play kitten on the tease. But the claws come out, elegantly manicured, of course, when Gary pays some attention to a pretty French girl ("You seemed to be conjugating some very irregular verbs with her"). At the moment when Grace grants Gary that consummation he so devoutly wishes, the camera deferentially turns to the window to watch the Vista-Vision heavens blaze with fireworks, courtesy of the Johnston Office.

The Virgin Queen (20th Century-Fox) straight from Hollywood's well-worn looms, is a plush, wall-to-wall tapestry depicting the rugged court life of late 16th century England. Chewing around the edges is Cinemactress Bette Davis who, according to the pressagents, was so taken with the script that she scurried out of retirement to play again the role of Queen Elizabeth (her first: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, with Errol Flynn, 1939).

The picture is fast on swordplay, heavy on overplay and light on screenplay. It begins with Walter Raleigh (Richard Todd), late of the Irish wars, winning an audience with the Queen; he wants to take three ships to the New World there to work for the greater glory of the 'British Empah." But the weary pan-amorous Elizabeth, who lost Errol Flynn back in the first film, likes the cut of Raleigh's jib-- and his beard too. He is blunt, charming, gay, adventurous and never forgets to throw his cloak over mud puddles. He accepts the job of captain of the palace guard, i.e., the Queens pet, in the hope that some day his ships will go out. But before long Raleigh has to fight it out with a couple of courtiers (Robert Douglas and Jay Robinson), who have been intriguing on the Queen's outskirts. He also beds down with a proud beauty named Beth Throgmorton (Joan Collins), and when Elizabeth tries to draw a tight reign on this horseplay, Raleigh boldly kicks up his heels. For this the Queen could hand Sir Walter his head, but by this time she is so encumbered with other worries that she just gives him a ship and his lady and tells them to get the hell out of town. Fadeout: Raleigh, his arm around Beth, sets sail for America to get his face on a million tobacco cans; back at the palace Queen Elizabeth, old and dejected carries on.

Good costumes, color and lighting help give the film a Rembrandt-like feeling with dark backgrounds, rich hues, bright faces. Actor Todd is suitably racy as Sir Walter, and Dan O'Herlihy as his side kick, Lord Derry, keeps pace. Britain's Joan Collins is easy on the eyes. In the regalia of her office, Actress Davis chugs about the palace like a twelve-cylinder Tudor, hand signals and all. She shaved some of her hair off for this role, but even so great a sacrifice was in vain. The Virgin Queen is strictly corn of the realm.

I Am a Camera [Remus; DC A] focuses chiefly on the one-dimensional but fantastic adventures in Berlin of a thoroughly engaging British female named Sally Bowles. No item for the children, it is probably the gamiest as well as the wackiest picture of the year--a sort of surrealist, 100-proof binge, skillfully carried through by Julie Harris.

The year is 1931. Actress Harris, as Sally, is a cafe singer of doubtful merit but nothing else about her merits any doubt. She is an amoral Junior Mistress with green fingernail polish, a nymph in sheet's clothing. She drinks Prairie Oysters (one raw egg, one dash Worcestershire sauce) for breakfast, stirs her gin with vast quantities of sentimentality. Down and out, Sally meets young Christopher Isherwood, a struggling author. He offers to share his apartment with her. In gratitude, she asks: "Shall we have a drink first, or shall we go right to bed?" But Isherwood is too idealistic for that sort of thing, so the two decide to live but not to sleep together. From that point on, Sally drags the reluctant Isherwood along on a series of crazy escapades, notably with a rich American who happily pays the bills in return for shacking up with Sally. Her one serious moment arrives when she decides that she is pregnant, but she again becomes her old sylph on discovering that she was falsely alarmed.

Nothing in the film is so fast and furious as one cleverly directed scene in which Isherwood, groaning with a hangover, is carried off like a corpse to the American's apartment. In no time at all the place is overrun with gay, gabbing souses, and everybody agrees that what poor old Isherwood needs is medical attention. In comes a huge, bulging masseur who carries the puny and protesting patient to a table where he is nearly pulverized. Before long, two funereal hydro-therapists enter and fill the bathtubs--one with scalding water, the other with cold. Efficient and precise, they lug Isherwood first to one tub, then to the other but his screams are scarcely heard above the loud glass clinks and boisterous chatter of the crowd. His last treatment is dealt out by a sinister, bearded ogre, who carries with him a kind of portable electric chair. As the party rages on, Isherwood's limp-wet body is strapped into the chair. The episode should go down in movie history as the most bizarre concoction since Un Chien Andalou (1929), when Surrealist Film Makers Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali threw an old mule's carcass across the tops of a couple of grand pianos and had the hero drag the whole shebang across the floor during a love scene.

Julie Harris is as frothy and exciting as a fresh bottle of champagne. Tossing her hands, her eyes and her lines about with abandon, she gives one of the finest performances of her career. Britain's Laurence (Romeo and Juliet] Harvey is just right as the embattled Isherwood, and Shelley Winters and Anton Diffring capably carry along the subplot. Director Henry Cornelius (Genevieve) had to contend with bad sound recording, but his achievement far outweighs the minor irritations.

Brimful as it is with sex, Camera has not yet won a seal of approval from Hollywood's Production Code office ("unacceptable in its present form"), but the Distributors Corp. of America still maintained that it would release the picture in Manhattan this week with or without the seal.

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