The New Pictures

Designing Woman (M-G-M). Reporters are madly romantic and have unlimited expense accounts. Manhattan career girls are born in the Midwest and tantalize men by biting their ear lobes. Bigtime gangsters send their sons to Princeton. Men are only big overgrown boys and have terrible taste in furniture. Women hate each other and get hysterical at the sight of blood. When a bachelor stops his convertible on a side road at night and murmurs "How about it, huh?" he is of course proposing marriage.

The rules of the romantic comedy game, as played by Hollywood, are at least as irrational as those that Lewis Carroll dreamed up for the Queen's croquet. But in the last 14 years, by playing cleverly to the rules, and even more cleverly breaking them, Director Vincente Minnelli has turned out half a dozen of the pleasantest comedies and musical comedies (An American in Paris, Father of the Bride) made in Hollywood since the '30s. And in Designing Woman, restricted still further by a plot that should have gone down the drain with bathtub gin, Director Minnelli has produced an uncommonly slick, prosperity-padded sequel to the emancipated-woman comedies of Depression times.

The heroine (Lauren Bacall) is a big-city career type who thinks she can run a business (designing clothes) in the daytime and a man (Gregory Peck) at night. This is O.K. with Peck, a fellow who seems to require nothing in life but steaks medium and ear lobes raw, but his wife's high-fashion friends get on his nerves. She replies that his low-life buddies get on her nerves too. Big fight. She wins it easily by invoking the old Hollywood rule of inverse virginity. When she proves that he had another bitch before he met her, Peck is a beaten dog.

Director Minnelli plays his game of pseudo-sociological croquet with the careless good form of a man who does not have to worry about making his satiric points. He plays for the box-office score instead, working the sex angles and the big names and the "production values" --yum-yum Metrocolor, flossy furniture, slinky clothes--with the skill of a cold old pro. The comedy is kept on a fairly low commercial plane too. The funniest line concerns a retired pugilist. "Who is that man with no nose?" asks wife Bacall suspiciously. "Oh, he has a nose," says husband Peck defensively. "It's inside."

Funny Face (Paramount) is one of those big Technicolor musicals that stagger toward the culminating nuptials like a determined but overequipped bride. The burden includes something old: Fred Astaire, now 56 and at last beginning to show it. Something new: Audrey Hepburn in her first musical. Something borrowed: six songs by George Gershwin, four of them from the 1927 musical of the same name. And something blue: the audience.

The wedding march gets off to a fast start with some noisy satire about attire. Kay Thompson is a shrewd old hag who edits a fashion mag. "THINK PINK!" she proclaims, and the women of the U.S. obediently buy pink poodles and pink mink. Then the lady finds a Serious Theme: "Clothes for the Woman Who Is Not Interested in Clothes." But who will model them?

The rest of the picture, involving about 90 minutes more of the customer's time and pretty nearly $3,000,000 of the producer's money, is written to the thesis that Audrey Hepburn is really just a dud who can happen to wear duds. It's a hard one to prove. Actress Hepburn not only looks her limpid best from first to last; she also does some snazzy dancing (she is better solo than with Astaire), and even sings effectively in a sort of absinthetic Sprechstimme with a touch of wood alcohol in the low notes.

Kay Thompson is amusing, too, though she can hardly take over the screen as she does a nightclub; and the Paris backgrounds are nice to look at. The real trouble is that crazy mixed-up script. By the time Hepburn and Astaire drift off in a cloud of doves, the spectator may find himself wishing that one of them was a pigeon--the kind that delivers the message.

The Big Land (Jaguar; Warner). "Thuh East needs beef!" That's what the man says, but regrettably, in this as in most of his independent productions. Actor Alan Ladd is able to deliver almost nothing but corn. For a moment now and then the wide screen opens on the blond infinities of Kansas grassland, but then it quickly narrows focus to the usual picayune plot: hero in trouble, villain (Anthony Caruso) in black, redhead (Virginia Mayo) in stays, weakling (Edmond O'Brien) in his cups. Then come the cattle drive, the big stampede, the solemn walk through the swinging doors, the bang-bang-bang that puts the audience out of its misery. Somewhere along the line this picture even manages to ring in a Swede who says, "By yumpin' yiminy!" In the main role Actor Ladd has achieved a certain originality: he has managed to break the strong, silent typecast he has so long been set in. In The Big Land he plays the weak, silent type. At 5 ft. 7 in. and 145 lbs., Ladd has always sat fairly small in the saddle, but since turning to independent production, his stature has been diminished by a striking executive slouch. At times he hardly seems to come up to his horse's knee, let alone to the heroine's lips, and he spends most of his time trying to conceal the fact. He rides as little as possible, kisses the girl just once, and mumbles his lines as though he were ashamed of them--as well he might be.

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