The New Pictures

The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger; United Artists). All that glitters is not necessarily tin foil. In this picture the moviegoer is offered the prospect of a hoppy ending, in which the hero gets the heroin. The Johnston office, standing to the Production Code ("The illegal drug traffic and drug addiction must never be presented"), has stamped its official nix on the picture--the sort of thundering knock that usually brings a lightning boost at the box office. On the screen, however, the picture provides much more than the cheap thrill it promises. The hero is a man who gets lost on the West Side of Chicago and does not bother to go looking for himself. The script, mild enough in comparison with Nelson Algren's cruel, powerful novel (TIME, Sept. 2, 1949) on which it is based, has nevertheless the crudeness of a thing scraped off some metropolitan sidewalk. But it has a human splendor, too--as the story of what happens to a man who cannot bear to let life itself happen to him.

Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) is the dealer for Schwiefka's poker game, and a very good dealer he is, with "an arm of pure gold," an eye like an ice pick, and a nylon line that pays out smooth and hauls the suckers in. But Frankie is a man who carries "a 40-lb. monkey on [his] back," and the only way to knock the monkey off is to get a shot of joy in the main vein. He kicks the habit when he does a stretch in stir, and swears off cards, too, when he comes out; he has learned the drums in prison, and he has a chance to try out with a commercial band. But Schwiefka (Robert Strauss) is not letting go, and neither is Frankie's wife (Eleanor Parker), a demented leech who is systematically eating his heart out. While the wife bleeds him white, Schwiefka sets up a frame. Frankie finds himself in jail on a bum rap. In return for one night in the dealer's slot, Schwiefka bails him out. Frightened and discouraged, Frankie is an easy mark for the needle of Louie, the dope peddler (Darren McGavin), who suggests that just one little fix is all he needs to get him round the bend. One fix leads to another, and another to another, until one day he is sitting in a cheap hotel with a price on his head and nothing to stop the pain of being alive. He begs a blonde tramp (Kim Novak) who loves him to get him just one fix. She refuses and pleads with him to give it up. He says he can't. It's easier to roll all the pain up into one big ball and then kill it with a needle.

This, and not the hypo of sensationalism, is the point of the movie, and the point strikes deep. The picture is sometimes a penny dreadful, because the scriptwriters have seldom consulted their hearts as carefully as they have calculated their effects; and sometimes it is an oldfashioned, hellfire sermon against moral indolence. At its best, though, the story lays bare the naked truth of human bondage, and this truth shines like a sword.

The heroic theme gets severely heroic treatment. Director Otto Preminger has dulled the sociological backdrop that Author Algren daubed so brilliantly, has edged his major characters more starkly against the mass. As a result, the picture is no intellectual slumming party but a hard-eyed study of human character, and the actors serve this end with a well-directed will. Arnold Stang, as Sparrow the dog stealer, looks as woebegone and unhealthy as a tenement torn just starting his ninth life on the garbage-can circuit, but he seldom hides the human quality of his part behind his television false face. Kim Novak is the type of the neighborhood frill, and she gives her big scene all she's got. Frank Sinatra, in particular, does a hurting job. Weary, weak, bewildered, battered, Frank's dogged Frankie is a creature who comes bitterly to understand that fate is character, fate is the thing a man can't give up.

Kismet (MGM) on Broadway looked like a Hollywood camel opera; as a Hollywood camel opera, it looks and sounds like the late hours of a Shriners' convention, i.e., fun in an overloaded fashion. Howard Keel, as the poet who goes from verse to better at the Wazir's court, cuts a tolerable fine figure in Mesopotamian laundry, and he sings like a baritone bulbul. Ann Blyth (see MILESTONES) is the girl and Vic Damone the boy. The music is borrowed din from Borodin, and except for Stranger in Paradise, it sounds like routine Tin Pan Allah. The incidental decorations are eye-filling, though--particularly an albino peacock that holds his end up with more style than most of the chorus girls show.

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (Warner). On July 21, 1921, nine clumsy biplanes crossed the Virginia coast and rumbled out to sea like tired June bugs. Eight of them were loaded to limit with a 2,000-lb. egg of destruction. Below, on the deck of the transport Henderson, a crowd of U.S. admirals, generals, Cabinet members and Congressmen milled for vantage with a score of newsmen and foreign diplomats. One by one the bombers buzzed past the target at about 2,500 ft. and laid their eggs. At the sixth pass, an aged officer put his head in his hands and wept, as the "unsinkable" German battleship Ostfriesland sank with a glug heard round the world--and echoed violently in military history from that day to this.

The sound, however, was effectively muffled for some time in the corridors of military bureaucracy; and the man who had so inconsiderately upset the steel-plated applecart of 19th century warfare, Brigadier General William Mitchell of the Army Air Service, soon found himself a chairborne colonel in Texas. The brass, as one recalcitrant officer put it, had decided "to ignore the airplane ... in the hope that if nobody mentioned it, it would go away."

The airplane did not go away, and neither did Mitchell. Topping a series of crashes, the Navy airship, the Shenandoah, was ripped apart in an Ohio line squall. Thirteen officers and men were killed. Two days later Mitchell dropped a journalistic blockbuster. "These accidents," he announced to the press, "are the result of the incompetency, the criminal negligence and the almost treasonable administration of our national defense by the Navy and War Departments."

The Army had no choice but court-martial, and Billy Mitchell made the most of it. He declared that the U.S. military establishment was obsolete; that the day of armies and navies, as history had known them, was done; that planes would one day fly faster than sound; that the air force should be an independent branch of the armed services. Infantry of the future, he predicted, would be transported through the air ocean and dropped with full equipment on enemy territory. As diplomatic collars popped, he announced that the next war would begin with a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; he told the court precisely how the attack would be delivered--and history, 16 years later, proved him precisely right.

The court* suspended him from service for five years, with loss of rank and privilege, and he resigned. (He died in 1936 at the age of 56.) The air force had lost a leader but found a prophet and a martyr, and in the next two decades Billy Mitchell was a major article of faith in the new cult of air power that justified its doctrines in World War II.

This is the story the film tells competently. At times, however, the celluloid seems to have been coated with whitewash as well as WarnerColor--a treatment that damages Billy as well as the story. Billy's virtues (courage and sincerity) were set off, as well as offset, by his vices (fanaticism and tactlessness). In the part as it is written, Gary Cooper plays the flamboyant Billy for a sort of militant old maid, and his historic cry for justice for the air service sometimes seems about as exciting as an old maid's protest that the neighbor's cat has swallowed her beloved canary.

The Last Frontier (Columbia) ought to put the white man on his guard. It has been a long, hard fight, but the Indians are beginning to win. The reason is not hard to find. Victor Mature is a scout for the bluecoats, but every time old Red Cloud's boys creep up to the fort for a hair party, Mature is reconnoitering the firewater or the colonel's wife (Anne Bancroft). The colonel (Robert Preston) is 'presented as a psycho who would rather chase Red Cloud than Actress Bancroft. Vic is only too happy to take over the home detail. "Animal!" Anne pants at him one night. "Sometimes," Vic complains, "she looks at me as if I was a bear." "H'm," says his sidekick (James Whitmore).

Whitmore advises Vic that "a good Christian fights it off." Vic is staggered. "How?" Says Whitmore: "He gets another woman." Says Mature indignantly: "I call that real sneaky." He much prefers to leave the colonel in a bear pit for the Indians to find. However, the script hauls him out just in time to lead the final charge--an exceptionally bloody bore.

If nothing else, the acting in this western is unusual. Robert Preston, playing the villain, reads his lines with an engaging military crispness and filches most of the moviegoer's sympathy from Hero Mature, who most of the time can hardly make himself understood. "I seen a boid," he keeps saying. "I seen a boid." Careful study of the script reveals that he is referring to a tribe of Indians called the Assiniboins.

* Among the members of the ten-man courtmartial: Major General Douglas MacArthur (who voted for acquittal). Among Mitchell's stoutest supporters: Major "Hap" Arnold, later boss of the Army Air Forces in World War II, and Major ''Tooey" Spaatz, World War II bomber boss, later first chief of staff of the separate air force.

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