The New Pictures

Death of a Scoundrel (RKO Radio) often looks suspiciously like a take-off on the bawdy life and gaudy death of Serge Rubinstein. The hero is a fellow named Clementi Sabourin (George Sanders), a bouncy Czech who seems to have spent his early years less on the level than under the rose. At any rate, as the camera finds him, Sanders is enthusiastically engaged in selling his own brother to the secret police in return for a passage to America. Arrived in New York, he steals a rich man's wallet from the tramp (Yvonne de Carlo) who stole it first, finds a draft for $20,000 tucked inside. Forging an indorsement, he takes a plunge in the stock market, clears $200,000 in a matter of hours, pays for the bad check with a good one. And so he finds himself, almost before the customs stamps have dried on his luggage, well on the way to becoming a millionaire.

"Business," he declaims, "is the art of getting something for nothing," and he promptly starts to play a game of hide-and-SEC with such flimflamboyance that one day he gets the sulks because he has made only $5,000,000 by closing time. With his filthy lucre, Sanders buys himself a fine Fifth Avenue mansion and decorates it with such costly bric-a-brac as a millionairess (Zsa Zsa Gabor), her secretary (Nancy Gates), the wife of a business rival (Coleen Gray), the widow (Lisa Ferraday) of the brother he had betrayed.

In the end, of course, the villain gets his just deserts, and that ain't razzberries, but for some incomprehensible reason the moviemakers felt called upon to wail at his wake. "He was the most hated man on earth," says Yvonne, in hushed, almost reverent tones. "But he could have been one of the great men in history. He was a genius." Which is rather like praising a man-eating shark for being Best of Breed.

You Can't Run Away from It (Columbia). "Hollywood," the late Fred Allen once snarled, "is responsible for the termite theory of art. Out there they figure they can survive by gnawing on their own backlog." As a matter of fact, about 10% of current big-studio production, according to one educated guess, are new versions of old successes. The fashion in these remakes is to slap on plenty of Technicolor, sign up a couple of famous players, hire a band to play good and loud--and call it all "A Great New Musical."

You Can't Run Away from It, a revival of Frank Capra's 1934 Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, has withstood the ravages of time better than most. In its first release, the Samuel Hopkins Adams story of a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) and a jobless reporter (Clark Gable) who follows her movements with somewhat more than professional attention, was a sensation--and not only at the box office. It set a style of furiously farcical social satire that, during the rest of the decade, relieved the general depression with some of the wackiest, wittiest comedies (Nothing Sacred, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) that Hollywood has ever made.

The new version has lost the social point of the old, along with other things. Dick Powell is at the megaphone, rather than Capra, and he uses the instrument less as a director should than as he did when he was a baby-faced crooner--to make things loud and corny. Further, the script has been thumbsily rewritten by Claude Binyon, and many of the sly little scenes have been converted into thwacking big musical numbers, set to some remarkably unmusical music. Both of the big names have been replaced by other big names (June Allyson and Jack Lemmon), and the new people give it all they've got. But somehow the second night in that tourist cabin, like the start of a second honeymoon, is not quite the same as the first--especially when those well-known "walls of Jericho" go tumbling down.

The fact that, despite these drawbacks,

You Can't Run Away From It is a slightly better-than-average movie is a striking tribute to the lasting human interest of the basic situation: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. It is a situation that most moviegoers have long been conditioned to accept, but in the case of this picture, those who remember the original will be wise to resist the conclusion ex pressed in the new title.

Julie (MGM) is a regular little pell-meller from the opening scene, in which a jealous husband (Louis Jourdan) quarrels with his wife (Doris Day) while she is driving a car, jams his foot on the throttle, and for the next two minutes gives the moviegoer practically all the sensations of being a member of an avalanche. After that, it somehow occurs to Julie that the man she is married to may not be entirely right in the head.

One night in bed she asks him about his jealousy, discovers that he murdered her previous husband, always thought to have been a suicide, because he could not stand the thought of any other man being near her. Fadeout, with the camera on the killer's gleaming eyes, and a long, dark night ahead.

Next morning Julie runs to the police, who tell her there is absolutely nothing they can do--no evidence. They advise her to stay out of town, keep out of his way. She flees secretly to San Francisco, puts up at a big, crowded hotel under an assumed name. The phone rings. "Julie," her husband coos, "you are going to die." And so on.

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