The New Pictures

The Burning Hills (Warner) is luridly ballyhooed as the love story of "the mixed-up girl and the awkward kid. Maria was a teenager who'd run in the wrong direction . . . and had never run into anyone like him." But adolescents who run to the theater expecting to see a hot-rod drama packed with jive-talking juveniles are due for a letdown. Burning Hills is simply one more version of the venerable western about the mean old rancher out gunning for the squatters who are fencing off the open range. The six-shooters bang, the corpses hit the dust, the cowboys gallop hell for leather across the wide screen. In between the bloodlettings, Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood speak pidgin English to each other and sleep out on the prairie without a chaperon. The villains had several good chances to rub them out, but missed.

Bus Stop (20th Century-Fox) is a rowdy little comedy that makes an engaging showcase for Marilyn Monroe's growing sureness as a comedienne. Based on William Inge's 1955 Broadway hit and skillfully liberated from the theater's confining forms by Adapter George (The Seven Year Itch) Axelrod, the film explodes with a Fourth of July excitement from the moment Cowboy Don Murray hits Phoenix to compete in his first rodeo.

Newcomer Murray is a loud and bumptious Candide running open-armed to embrace a shiny new world. What he grabs is Marilyn Monroe, who has stopped off on her slow progress from the Ozarks to Hollywood to earn some carfare as a "chantoosie" in a third-rate nightclub. Murray quivers to his boot heels when Marilyn slithers onstage to sing That Old Black Magic in a nasal whine, while fluttering a bilious green scarf in a deadly parody of Hildegarde's continental airs and graces.

Murray's courtship has all the sublety of a banzai charge. On the morning of the rodeo he drags a tousled-headed, sleepy-eyed Marilyn from her bed and into the parade; while he manhandles bulls and heifers, she cowers limply in the stands. When she makes a belated dash for freedom, he lassoes her off the Los Angeles bus and bundles her onto one bound for Montana and his isolated ranch.

Snowbound at a rural bus stop, Marilyn continues her feeble efforts to escape. When fatherly Arthur O'Connell cannot put a snaffle on his coltish pal, the muscular bus driver (Robert Bray) finally takes Murray outside and gives him the larruping he has been asking for. The fight is the film's catalyst. From it, Murray learns that a man has not always "gotta right to the things he loves," while Marilyn discovers, to her surprise, that his ear-splitting exuberance is just a protective screen around a small boy.

Only at the very end of the film does Director Joshua Logan's hand lose its expert competence: in their reconciliation, Murray and Marilyn are allowed to chew a bit too much scenery, and the CinemaScope closeups are so brobdingnagian that the pores on the actor's face stand out like craters on the moon.

Except for these mild missteps, Bus Stop is neatly paced and satisfying. Actress Monroe, robbed of her usual glamour by bleached makeup and unmoistened lips, still generates enough sex to console the nation's Venus-worshipers, and her comedy turns stand up well against the broad playing of Don Murray and the smooth professionalism of Betty Field and Eileen Heckart.

Johnny Concho (United Artists) stars Frank Sinatra in his first western. As the bratty kid brother of the No. 1 gun-slinger of Cripple Creek, Frankie treads hard on the toes of the town's honest if cowardly citizens. When a better badman (William Conrad) erases big brother, Frankie is stunned to discover that no one loves him except beauteous Phyllis Kirk. Even Phyllis gets fed up when frightened Frankie denies his identity in order to save his hide. A pep talk by Preacher Keenan Wynn, however, puts steel in Sinatra's backbone, and he comes back home to deliver a scolding to the townsfolk. Badman Conrad is so unnerved that he only wings Frankie before he is rubbed out by the aroused citizenry. The real villain of the picture is the inept producer who selected this banal film for its leading man. Producer and leading man: Frank Sinatra.

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