The New Pictures

Trial (MGM) turns out to be as tellingly effective an anti-Communist movie as Hollywood has ever made. In a few painfully real scenes, iced with satire, Director Mark (Champion) Robson and Writer Don Mankiewicz have drawn an unsettling picture of just how U.S. Communists adopt and then ambush a "good cause."

The story outline is familiar enough to newspaper readers: Angel Chavez, a teenage boy of Mexican descent, is on trial for the murder of a girl who died of a heart attack when Angel made a crude pass at her. Glenn Ford, as a young university law instructor who is out for trial experience, takes on the boy's case in association with a shrewd legal eagle played by Arthur

Kennedy. Idealist Ford flinches at Kennedy's plans to raise a defense fund, but, after all, what counts most is the acquittal of an innocent boy. Moreover, the defense is already hotly surrounded by a nationwide wave of antagonism stirred up by race baiters and hatemongers.

Before Ford can get his case moving, he discovers that Kennedy has brought in the huge propaganda machinery of the "All-People's Party." Kennedy even works up a milling, militant "Free Angel Chavez Rally" in Madison Square Garden. He packs the place with hard-core Communists, hot-eyed hangers-on, droning speechmakers and "entertainers." Kennedy collects his defense funds, and the party has its martyr, as well as its unsuspecting suckers. Next step: the conviction of Angel Chavez as a springboard for anticapitalist propaganda.

Trial does not have to pound away at its theme; it jabs sparingly, but mostly in the right places. Glenn Ford, as the honest and sometimes bewildered lawyer, and Arthur Kennedy, as the smooth Communist manipulator, are both topnotch. Dorothy McGuire is just right as the reformed fellow-traveling secretary who regretfully looks on as Ford gets caught in the snare; Rafael Campos (The Blackboard Jungle) is a good Angel. And the picture has another attraction: filmed in black and white for a screen of much less than the common contemporary width, it can be comfortably watched by people who do not have wall eyes.

The Warriors (Allied Artists). "Ten Frenchmen to one Englishman? That's about right," sneers the Black Prince (Errol Flynn). The Constable of France

(Noel Willman) can only snarl the lame retort: "You choose to jest." Then he sounds the charge. Maces mash and broadswords boing. In the end French heads are rolling about the landscape like mothballs at a spring cleaning, while Errol proves, as always, a beryl in peril. He loses nothing but his mustache--but then, what is Errol Flynn without his mustache? As he comes up for the final clinch with the heroine (Joanne Dru), he looks as sapless as Samson on the morning after his lawn was mowed. Or maybe it is only that Errol, at 46, is getting a little old for this sort of thing. So is his public.

The Left Hand of God (20th Century-Fox). In their tireless, tiresome efforts to make box-office capital out of the Roman Catholic priest, the movies have trotted out the crooning priest (Bing Crosby in Going My Way}, the labor priest (Karl Maiden in On the Waterfront), the whisky priest (Henry Fonda in The Fugitive).

In Left Hand, they present Humphrey Bogart as the revolver priest.

As the film begins--with one of the biggest (and crassest) lapel-clutch introductions a film ever had--Bogart, in clerical black, is seen staggering on-camera across the wastes of up-country China, a backward look of terror on his face and a wicked-looking .45 in his hand. He soon comes to a mission outpost, where he is welcomed as the new man the bishop promised to send. And yet, as the doctor's wife (Agnes Moorehead) prattles to her husband (E. G. Marshall), "there seems to be so much in him that wasn't intended to be a priest." One look at Bogart, and the resident nurse (Gene Tierney) gets the same idea.

Her bosom begins to heave during his sermons, and Humphrey himself gets unseasonably hot under the ecclesiastical collar. However, by the time the audience has experienced the illicit delights of what amounts to a free trial package of sacrilege, the script "does a gopher," as Hollywood writers say. It runs for cash cover.

Bogart reveals that he is not a priest at all: he is an American airman, shot down over China, who took service with a Chinese robber baron, and now all he wants is to get back to some of mom's pan-fried mush. And so the way is dynamited to a happy ending.

The moral seems to be that if a young woman falls in love with a priest, she should not give up hope of marrying him and living happily ever after. It will probably turn out, after all, that the priest is really just some nice young hardened criminal in disguise.

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