On Screen

...The French, it seems to me, make two kinds of movies: films about sex and films starring Fernandel, also about sex...

...Based on Michael Gazzo's Broadway hit, this one tells the unhappy tale of a drug addict whose affliction, as you might imagine, all but wrecks his marriage and ruins his life...

...I thought the best of the new films was 20th Century Fox's production of A Hatful of Rain, another in the growing series of tense, murky dramas dedicated to exploring some of the seamier undersides of American society...

...Karloff was clumsy and slow, but he could walk through walls and tear people's arms off at the shoulders...

...his only victims are a blind man, a housemaid, and a small, foolish boy...

...All of which explains why I didn't altend any French movies last week, in case anyone was wondering...

...lower middle class...

...I realize I'm an incurable Philistine, but I feel the same way about French songs...

...Don Murray as the addict and Eva Marie Saint as his unhappy wife are a little bit loo genteel and well-scrubbed to be entirely convincing as oppressed members of I In...

...Don Murray lolling his father that he's a junkie delivers llie line with the puzzled look of a tot caught with liis hand in I he cookie jar...

...The ads said there was a trained nurse on the premises and warned the fainthearted to stay at home, so I showed up with the highest expectations of being thoroughly chilled...

...The new monster is played by Christopher Lee in appropriately gruesome make-up, but after you get used to that he's really too effete to inspire much terror...

...The only real disappointment is a dull score from Cole Porter, but Astaire, now in his mid-fifties, is still as nimble as ever and that should be enough...

...Contrary to expectations, I also had a pretty good time at Silk Stockings, a musical adaptation of Ninotch-ka...

...Anyone else has a better than even chance of flattening him, and this detracts somewhat from those wonderful moments when people go wandering down endless dim corridors to see what that funny shuffling noise is at the other end...

...But I was disappointed...

...On SCREEN By William Murray Dope Fiends and Other Monsters I finally got around last week to seeing a few of the more recent releases before rushing back to my observation post on the south shore of Long Island, where the sun shines, the waves roll in and no one even talks of going to the movies...

...Well, messages aside, it's a pretty entertaining melodrama—everything but snow flurries and someone coming to foreclose on the mortgage— and it's beautifully acted, especially by Lloyd Nolan as the blustering father and Anthony Franciosa as the victim's brother...

...George Tobias, Jules Munshin, Peter Lorre and Joseph Buloff carry off what comedy there is with considerable gusto, and Janis Paige, another visual miracle, handles herself with brass and polish as a touring movie mermaid with too much water in her ears...

...Nevertheless, the nimir has plenty of excitement, a lot of it centered on as unattractive a trio of comic-book dope peddlers as you could imagine...

...as the man in back of me said to bis girl friend oil the way out of the theater, they just don t make monsters any more the way they used to...

...The most interesting thing about the picture, however, is the fact that it's currently playing to crammed houses all over the country, outdrawing even such high-budget attractions as The Prince and the Showgirl bv two to one...

...I have strong allegiances to certain old films, and I couldn't imagine anyone improving on the delicate comedy of Garbo and Melvyn Douglas...

...This new treatment of the Frankenstein legend does have a couple of spine-tingling moments, but for sheer thrills it doesn't begin to approach the original 1931 version that featured Boris Karloff as the man-made creature with homicidal instincts...

...Lee, on the other hand, is a pushover...

...There's also an exploration of an unhappy father-son relationship that is supposed, I guess, to account for the emotional instability that is characteristic of all junkies...

...Monsters, to be really effective, have to be not only gruesome to look at but damn near indestructible...

...The idea is that heroin is bad for you and that the people who sell it are evil fellows...

...You had to get the whole town together into a bristling mob to put a stop to him...

...As an old horror-film addict, however, I couldn't get out of town without dropping in at the Paramount for a look at The Curse of Frankenstein, which opened last week at a midnight showing billed irresistibly as a '"Monster Horrorthon Screamiere...

...The most notable is the dancing of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, a graceful frail with a peachy pair of gams...

...My own critical policy is to avoid them all unless I have absolute assurance from unimpeachable advance scouts that there is something new to be seen...

...At the moment, there's hardly an art theater in all of New York that isn't playing one or the other variety...

...There's an economic lesson in all this for some beady-eyed opportunist, but...

...To get right to the point, my suspicions were basically correct, but Silk Stockings has some solid virtues of its own...