Mortality Plays

The Money Trap would be a pretty good suspense melodrama if it could only learn when to keep its trap shut. Until the dialogue gets in his way, Hero Glenn Ford is quite persuasive as a gruff $9,200-a-year detective, blessed with "a beautiful home, the wife I want, a swimming pool, three cars and two servants." The fringe benefits have been provided by his rich missus, miscast Elke Sommer, who was obviously born to play a bauble-headed blonde who marries a man to enjoy his money instead of bringing her own. Elke makes a weak role weaker by delivering all of her lines as though she had learned them phonetically, but she at last articulates one crucial point: her cash has run out.

The movie springs fitfully to life when Ford and his greedy partner, Ricardo Montalban, go to investigate a shooting at the home of Dr. Joseph Gotten. Gunned down by the shady doctor, a dying thief tells them that he was trying to lift $500,000 stashed in a wall safe. The cops persuade themselves that ill-gotten gains might as well line the pockets of two hard-working law officers, and conspire to do some Cotten-pickin' after hours. Their moonlighting ends in a mock-Shakespearean finale. While Montalban overacts outrageously, Ford fires bullets along with a somewhat more lethal barrage of words, words, words. "It isn't the money," intones Ford. "It never is. It's people. The things they want, and the things they'll do to get it."

Overburdened with social significance and sloppy syntax, Trap is chiefly notable for the appearance in a secondary role of onetime glamour girl Rita Hayworth. Rita, frequently cast opposite Ford since they co-starred in Gilda in 1946, plays a frowzy, pathetic old flame who knows the rackets but preserves all her secrets in booze. Puffy, plainspoken, her veneer meticulously scraped away, Rita at 47 has never looked less like a beauty, or more like an actress.

Ten Little Indians is an anemic copy of the 1945 film And Then There Were None, which was based on the stage adaptation of Agatha Christie's durable whodunit, which was inspired by the nursery rhyme. Unfortunately, nothing has been added but tired blood.

The plot remains a model of wicked ingenuity, marooning ten wrongdoers with an anonymous, homicidal host who intends to bring his guests to justice one by one. Properly done, this old-fashioned brand of carnage can hardly miss. The remakers of Indians fail in every impossible way. By shifting the scene from a godforsaken island to an alpine retreat, they are able to engineer a couple of spectacular deaths among the crags, but the mood of boxed-in menace is efficiently destroyed. Held to a laggard pace, such veteran actors as Stanley Holloway, Wilfred Hyde-White and Leo Genn convey the resigned air of specialists summoned too late to be really useful. Mod sex appeal is dragged in by Shirley Eaton, fisticuffs by Hugh O'Brian. And, unlikely as it seems, there is Teen Idol Fabian, quaffing a lethal dose of poison immediately after singing a song. Fabian is the first of Indians' victims, and the luckiest. For him, the end comes quickly.

The Sleeping Car Murder is only the first of the multiple killings in this straightforward French thriller. A sultry perfume saleswoman is strangled in a six-person compartment aboard the Marseille-Paris express, and several of her companions are dead before Police Inspector Yves Montand corners the killer for the traditional wrap-up of clues, motives and revelations.

Murder follows a heavily signposted route, but its cast has esprit to spare. As usual, Simone Signoret leaves a tingle in the air, though she is done in when the plot is only half unraveled. Preternaturally sensitive to the supreme folly of being human, Simone (Mme. Montand in private life) plays a third-rate actress who mocks herself as "an overripe hag out for a good time" with a young student (Jean-Louis Trin-tignant). She feels guilty about nothing until she has to confess that even a woman of distinction must sometimes travel in a crowded second-class compartment to save money. As another hunted passenger, Catherine Allegret (Signoret's daughter and lookalike) portrays a bumbling young innocent without seeming too defenseless about it.

Nudged along by a nervous, nosy camera, the action leapfrogs from a jostling train car to teeming streets to the gritty ambiance of a police prefecture aswarm with unseemly night people. Murder is inconsequential but steadily entertaining, the victory of seasoned professionalism over the sort of paperback-novel nonsense made to order for killing an hour or so between trains.

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