The New Pictures

Teacher's Pet (Perlberg-Seaton; Paramount). Clark Gable is the city editor of a big metropolitan daily, a self-made man whose every word proclaims what can be done with good material by bad workmanship. Doris Day is an instructor of journalism. When she invites Gable to address her class, he replies with a sneer: "In the school I graduated from, there were no lectures without four-letter words in them ... I think you're wasting your time, and I prefer not to waste mine."

Nevertheless, on his publisher's orders, Editor Gable shows up at school, where he learns a thing or two he doesn't like: that culture, broadly understood, is the only thing that makes human beings any better than animals, and that when a man hates cultured people it is usually because he secretly feels they are better than he is. Clever fellow that he is, Gable also learns that Day is a girl, and he soon persuades her he needs special instruction. "I'm afraid we'll have to work together at night," she says. He nods, appreciatively inspecting the educational facilities, as she innocently inquires: "What sort of things would you like to tackle?" Needless to say, education is wedded to experience in the end, but by that time the point is labored, and the fun is tired.

Desire Under the Elms (Don Hartman; Paramount). The stage is to the drama of Eugene O'Neill as a glass is to whisky. Take it away, and the stuff is not there. In the theater, where it ran 208 performances in 1924-25, Desire Under the Elms was properly furnished with a dark and womblike set, and the spectator could feel himself shut up in the incestuous nightmare at the core of the puritan mentality. But in this picture the atmosphere is dissipated in the irrelevant vastness of the VistaVision screen, and almost all the emotional pressure is lost.

The play, to which Irwin Shaw's script is reasonably loyal, is flagrantly Freudian, and it is to Hollywood's credit that the extremities of the Elms have not been pruned. O'Neill set out to write a Yankee Oedipus Rex, but what came out might more appropriately have been titled Sex Rex. The antagonists of the drama are a father (Burl Ives) and a son (Anthony Perkins), and the subject of their struggle, as in the myths of heroic succession on which the drama is modeled, is the land (a New England farm) and the woman (Sophia Loren). The son aspires to his inheritance, but the father, a massive brute of 76 who vows he will live to be 100, is too strong for him. Then the father marries a young wife--the necessary act of hubris that sets the tragedy in train.

The woman soon enters a rival claim to the succession, and she advances her pretensions in a woman's devious way. She makes the old man promise that if she gives him a son, he will make that son his heir. Whereupon, since the old man has lost his sexual strength, she proceeds to seduce the young one. Suspecting nothing, the son connives so enthusiastically at his own disinheritance that he wins her heart as he gives her a child. The child is born and everybody is happy, but when the father disinherits the elder son in favor of the younger, the lover begins to doubt the motives of his mistress. Desperate, she proves her love by smothering the baby. Horrified, he tells the sheriff. But in the end he understands that he shares her guilt, and he goes to share her punishment.

Gamy meat, and O'Neill served it raw. But after a trip through the production grinder, his scenes come out on film looking rather like a row of pretty little veal birds. The stark images of the play are softened on the screen to glossy blowups. The bare New England farmhouse looks like the dream cottage in a rural real-estate prospectus. The actors play in a welter of unrelated styles. But the most important trouble with the picture is that it was ever produced. O'Neill's characters are not people; they are symbols. And the camera has a cynical eye that cannot seem to help reducing whatever tries to be larger than life to very small potatoes.

The Monte Carlo Story (Titanus; United Artists) is pretty funny up to a point. Unfortunately, the point arrives about 20 minutes after the picture begins, and the show goes on for another 79 minutes.

The fun starts when a couple of aging land sharks move into the well-known European water hole and try to put the bite on each other. He (Vittorio De Sica) is a rentless wreck of an Italian nobleman named Conte Dino della Fiaba (Count Fib). She (Marlene Dietrich) is an enchantress who has come full Circe and now finds herself with nothing to her name but a title, Marquise Maria de Crevecoeur (Lady Heartbreak). She thinks he's rich, he thinks she's rich, and it all makes a pleasant little comedy of errors until suddenly the script makes an error that is not funny in the least. It introduces an American millionaire (Arthur O'Connell) who does almost nothing for the next hour but spin the wheel of a 155-ft. yacht that used to belong to Kaiser Wilhelm II, goggle at Marlene, and say "Gee!"

The idea, of course, was to give the glamorous Dietrich back to the millions who once adored her on the screen--and who still jampack the nightclubs she plays in. But Director Samuel Taylor has tactlessly insisted that the lady (who now admits to being fiftyish) concentrate on sex, and has largely overlooked the possibilities of her sophisticated comedy talents. The moviegoer, as a result, is sometimes painfully aware that the siren is a bit rusty; yet he is seldom allowed to realize that the belle, even with diminished resonance, still rings.

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