The New Pictures

Blue Denim (20th Century-Fox), cut from the same bolt as the Broadway play, is an honest, occasionally touching effort to dramatize what Dylan Thomas called the puny measure of happiness that "time allows . . . Before the children green and golden/ Follow him out of grace." The movie also follows through to treat the children's vast measure of unhappiness after 16-year-old Arthur Bartley and his 15-year-old girl friend Janet fall from grace and into the evil clutches of an abortionist. The fault here seems to lie not so much with the youngsters' incautious lovemaking, or even with the devil in their flesh, as with obtuse parents, who are never properly plugged in to the problems of their young.

At the outset. Mr. Bartley (Macdonald Carey) has the family dog "put away" without so much as consulting young Arthur. The inordinate attention lavished by Mrs. Bartley (Marsha Hunt) on her daughter's approaching marriage, plus the prosaic preoccupations of these prosaic parents, drives young Arthur to a basement escape with his contemporaries, where furtive beers foam up into braggadocio, cigarettes mingle with clumsy sex experiments, and draw poker alternates with the raw pathos that gives the picture its fleeting moments of real feeling. It is only in the quiet, anxious scenes of awakening love that Director-Co-Writer Philip Dunne manages to capture the pains and confusion of adolescence and the awful homemade isolation of children from their parents. He is fortunate to have as the children plaintive, pony-tailed Carol Lynley, 17. and blond, handsome 17-year-old Brandon de Wilde, who has acquired longer legs and a deeper voice since he played the small boy in Shane. Both are quietly affecting in the difficult acting chore of seeming ineffectual.

But most of Blue Denim will not quite wash. All the good intentions of Producer Charles Brackett fail to keep the picture from looking like a rerun of an old Studio One Summer Theater. It is too often stilted, static, unreal, and riddled with tasteless jokes and cliches that would embarrass Helen Trent. It is also awkwardly resolved: the play ended with the girl surviving the abortion--and only then did the walls of noncommunication tumble --but the movie tacks on a climactic chase in the night, in which the boy's father snatches the girl from danger, then gives his son enough money to go off and get married somewhere, presumably anywhere, so long as it's away from home. This dubious happy ending suggests an even more dubious moral: Go as far as you like, kids, but admit everything, and then it's possible to get the hell away from those insufferable parents.

Last Train from Gun Hill (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is a slick saddle-soap opera of TV's "adult'' school, with enough shallow currents of sociology, Greek tragedy and child psychology to titillate horse-opera highbrows.

"Maybe it was my fault. It ain't easy to raise a boy without a mother," sorrowfully explains the beef baron (Anthony Quinn), whose tosspot son (Earl Holliman). a sort of Leo Gorcey in chaps, has raped and murdered, just for pure meanness, the beautiful Indian "squaw missy" wife of the marshal (Kirk Douglas). The job of avenging his squaw's death is made much more complicated by the fact that Widower Douglas, "a poor fool with high-flown ideas," is also the best friend of Widower Quinn.

Except for some bracing outdoor scenes, shot in southern Arizona, of amber plains, crystalline streams and Corot-cool forests, strikingly composed by Director John (The Old Man and the Sea) Sturges, the picture is mostly one long, gun-slinging showdown that fairly oozes blood and bathos. One tough gets his right through a poker table, another is mowed down by a sawed-o^ shotgun at close range. The hell-bent kid is killed by mistake by one of his own saddle-bum chums.

There is nothing--and nobody--left for Kirk Douglas to shoot down but his old friend, in a fair draw. Justice done, he hops the last train from Gun Hill. As his late friend's tart (Carolyn Jones) remarks: "Ya gotta admire someone who's got that much guts."

Even more admirable is Actress Carolyn Jones, who is required to deliver most of the old chestnuts ("Put your money where your mouths are"), but manages to give moviegoers one of the funniest, freakiest, most cussedly appealing heroines since Bette Davis, whom she strongly suggests, played the down-South tart in Jezebel.

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