The New Pictures

The View from Pompey's Head (20th Century-Fox), as Hamilton Basso saw it in his bestselling novel of 1954, was a rather unnerving spectacle in which the contemporary South looked like a magnolia tundra strewn with discarded Coke bottles. In the picture version, the view is strictly from the cash register, and the focus scrooches down pretty quickly on the kind of hot grits that generally go with the greens Hollywood loves best.

The hero (Richard Egan), a Southerner who has "lapsed" to New York, is sent back on legal business to his home town, Pompey's Head. On the way, he limbers up his lip for both the accent and the girl (Dana Wynter) he left behind him. The accent Actor Egan never does quite come to isolate, but the girl he gets alone in a hotel room on his first day in town.

When the girl's husband (Cameron Mitchell), a got-rich peckerhead, finds out about that hotel visit, he ravishes his wife, just to even the score. Next day behind a sand dune, Egan has a "soul-shaking experience" with the lady, but Mitchell is victorious in the end. He tells his wife that if she leaves him, she must also leave the old plantation. In the book the plantation was no more than a makeweight for the whole way of life it implied. In the picture it merely looks as if she loves her fun, but oh, that real estate!

Guys and Dolls (Samuel Goldwyn; M-G-M), as a Broadway musical, had all the vulgar swagger of a fink* with his mink at 4 a.m. on the crosstown, and a lot more salt than the lox in Lindy's. It was not really Runyon, just as Runyon was not really Broadway, but as a pinstriped fairy tale with garlic on its breath, it made an honest-to-Gotham hit, and it ran for three years.

Sold to Sam Goldwyn for a record price of $1,000,000, Guys and Dolls is now flung to the cheap seats as a $5.000,000 Hollywood musical. Despite some bad lapses, it is a Sam-dandy of a picture show, a 158-minute blur of unmitigated energy, one of the year's best musicals.

The Hollywood script keeps close to the Broadway book. As the show begins, such assorted knouts, beer-needlers and pete-lousers as Nicely Nicely, Benny Southstreet, Harry the Horse and Angie the Ox are in their customary condition of p.m. panic. "The oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York" is about to sink. Its proprietor, one Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), cannot raise the rent money for a suitably secluded backroom. Happens, however, he runs into Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando), a curly wolf at all games of chance, and lays the sucker a G he cannot make it to Havana, inside 24 hours, with a doll (Jean Simmons) named Sarah Brown, from the Save-A-Soul Mission.

Sky is accustomed to dolls "wit' nice teeth and no last names," so he makes Miss Brown a straight proposition: in return for her company, he promises to deliver twelve of "the Devil's first-string troops" to prayer meeting come Saturday night. She accepts, but in Havana the track is faster than she expected because Sky puts a hypo in her cow juice. Even so, they are soon lugging in on the preacher for a matrimonial finish.

Faithful in detail, the picture is false to the original in its feeling. The Broadway production was as intimate as a hotfoot; the Goldwyn movie takes a blowtorch full of Eastman Color and stereophonic sound to get the same reaction. More specifically, a couple of the principals do not quite deliver. Brando as the gambler has a nylon slickness and the right occupational crimp around the eyes. He dances, too, in one wonderful piece of mambo-jumbo, with a kind of animal rapture that moviegoers will want to see more of but he sings in a faraway tenor that sometimes tends to be flat.

Jean Simmons sings sharp, in a voice that is not much better, but she flings herself into Sarah's saturnalia with a pelvic hullabaloo that should make the public forget about her upper register. Vivian Elaine, the only big name held over from the Broadway cast, is just right as the blonde who celebrates her anniversary (14 years engaged) by catching a cold in her Bronxial tubes; and when she screeches Take Back Your Mink ("to from whence it came"), the evening is made. Frank Sinatra, as Nathan Detroit, not only acts as if he can't tell a Greek roll from a bagel; he sings as though his mouth were full of ravioli instead of gefullte fish. Stubby Kaye and B. S. Fully, both from the Broadway cast, suggest best of all the seraphic moldiness of Runyon's ronyons.

As a whole, the show is strong enough to carry its weak parts. It starts with one of the friskiest and funniest ballets ever seen on screen: a sort of midtown montage of pimps and policemen, dips and drabs, teens and touts that comes to a climax in a hilarious antiphony of horse-players as they peruse what Runyon called "the morning bladder." In fact, from first to last--and the last dance is a thrilling choreography, set in a picturesque sewer, of the primordial rite of dice--Michael Kidd has staged his ballets even more effectively than he did on Broadway. Frank Loesser's lyrics are classy, too, whether his music is or not, and Director Joseph Mankiewicz has often made the most of a very good Broadway book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.

The Tender Trap (M-G-M). "Wow!" says David Wayne. "What a waterhole!" David is on vacation from marriage and the Indiana Pharmaceutical Co., and Frank Sinatra's plushy New York apartment is an ideal deer park. As the fair game begins popping out in all directions, so do David's eyes. A smooth little blonde glides out of the bedroom; she promises to come back soon and bring Frank some fish. Another goldilocks jounces in the door--"to walk the dog," Frank casually explains. An Amazonian brunette, with the look of a lady wrestler in search of a match, wanders in to offer Sinatra a large box of cheese. Also in the field: Celeste Holm, a girl violinist who likes to come over to Frankie's house and fiddle, and a certain Miss Snr (rhymes with fur), who works at the U.N.

Mattress farce? Not at all. It's a peptic problem play. The woman-eating orchid gets indigestion when he reaches for just one too many: Debbie Reynolds. He sees her first at a Broadway tryout. She turns her back to him. Sinatra snaps: "This girl has got something." It is a one-sided judgment, and he lives to regret it. When he asks her to dinner, she replies: "Why?" She is a woman, it develops, with a planned he-conomy, and Sinatra, even though he is "attractive in an off beat, beat-up sort of way," does not quite fill the grey flannel suit in her hope chest. In the end she makes the alterations herself, and the tender trap turns out to be Love, though the teeth in it spell SCARSDALE.

The picture, in short, like the Broad way play, does no more than curl up nice and cozy with a bachelor's address book -- a fairly entertaining way to spend an evening. What's more, Frank Sinatra as the bachelor turns out to be a good comedian; time and again he takes the play away from such gifted scene stealers as David Wayne and Celeste Holm. They all gang up in one fine scene -- teetering about on toxic joints with arteries aflame, gulping slugs of tomato juice from the last clean shot glass -- to play a glorious morning after. Sample dialogue: "I found your shoes." "Where were they?" "In the icebox." "Oh."

* "A fink," according to Damon Runyon, 'being such a guy as is extra nothing."

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