The New Pictures

Crime in the Streets (Lindbrook; Allied Artists) is a fairly serious little sociological thriller that is flawed by a streak of what might be called sentenementality: the idea that every garbage can has a silver lining. Adapted from Reginald Rose's television play, Paso Doble, it tells the story of a teen-aged rumblebum (John Cassavetes) named Frankie.

Frankie was a good boy to begin with, Playwright Rose explains, with the easy assurance of a man who has obviously read quite a few case histories of slum children. But when Frankie was good, nobody paid any attention to him; so he decided to be bad. That settled, he developed a morbid fear of being touched; he began to rough his mother up; he led his gang in brutal street fights; finally he decided "to bump a guy" who had offended him. "I feel loose," he tells his accomplice as they wait giggling in the shadows for their victim, like little boys fumbling in a dark closet for the cookie jar. "Like I was made for gettin' even."

The main parts are sharply routed out, particularly by Mark Rydell as the drooling little sadist who gets a perverted kick out of violence, and by Actor Cassavetes, who looks as if his name were Marlon Sinatra. The script, however, is stagy and sometimes dawdling, and when the picture is over, the customer will probably realize that he has not really experienced what life in the slums is like. He has merely gone slumming.

Gaby (M-G-M). Hollywood casts Leslie Caron as if she were a broken leg. In Lili, in The Glass Slipper, and now in her latest picture, she has been rigidly restricted to the role of 1) a hot-eyed French girl who is also 2) a pathetic little orphan, 3) a highly trained ballet dancer, at least in her dreams, and 4) dreamily in love with an actor who looks as pretty as a cupcake (Mel Ferrer, Michael Wilding and now John Kerr).

In Gaby (which is distantly related to Waterloo Bridge, a 1930 melodrama by the late Robert Sherwood). Actress Caron has to do all these things and something even sillier. She plays a French ballet dancer who is too prim to succumb to the man she loves, though they are engaged to be married and he is about to go into battle. Later on, she refuses to marry him because, during a period when she thought him dead, she had not refused other men. After watching Actor Kerr (who played the schoolboy falsely accused of homosexuality in Broadway's Tea and Sympathy) go gollygoshing through the love scenes in his second screen role, the audience may reasonably suspect that the French girl has simply been trying, in a tactful way, to say no thanks, buster.

Not at all, Actress Caron, who is made up to look rather like one of those sentimentally pretty pollywogs in a Disney cartoon, hastens to roll her eyes soulfully and explain that she is just not good enough for the young man any more. "Ay ham deefrawnt.'' Fortunately, all this takes place during World War II in London, and a buzz-bomb soon comes along to simplify the situation. It pounds some sense into the heroine's head, to judge from the script, but it only leaves the spectator in a daze.

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (20th Century-Fox), as William Bradford Huie described it in his bestselling novel, was the success story of "the Henry Ford of harlotry." Part fiction and part fact, the book recounted the life of a woman who invented a sort of assembly-line method of servicing the servicemen in Honolulu during World War II. After the Hollywood censor has tidied up the basic story, the moviegoer is left to assume--since nobody at Mamie's place does anything worse than dance--that those thousands of soldiers and sailors who jam the joint every night must have been driven mad by the sound of the Hawaiian band--an explanation that is not so farfetched as it seems.

Mamie (Jane Russell) gets the bum's rush out of San Francisco as the story starts, and she soon ends up wearing a purple dress in a Honolulu dance hall, where in some mysterious way that seems to be connected with "sitting-out time," she begins to make $40 a day. When war comes, Mamie makes much more. She buys real estate, rents it to the U.S. Government, begins to dream of the day when she can go back home and "look down on all those people who looked down on me."

Meanwhile, Mamie practices her social climbing on the hilltop where Hawaii's high society lives. She falls in love with a young writer (Richard Egan) who lives there, and when he goes away to war, he asks her to stop whatever it is that she does on behalf of the armed forces, and to become his wife. Mamie wants to, but she can't quite bring herself to settle for one man's love when she can have so many men's money. The Revolt of Mamie Stover is the tragedy of a girl whose pinup boy is Andrew Jackson--the face on the $20 bill.

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