Cinema: The New Pictures, Oct. 28, 1957

Pal Joey (Columbia), a musical that has enjoyed two major runs on Broadway (1940-41, 1952-53), was once modestly characterized by John O’Hara, who wrote the playscript, in a phrase that has become a Broadway byword. Said O’Hara: “It ain’t Blossom Time” It sure ain’t, but it is a dandy piece of entertainment−the sad, hilarious story of how a kept man lost his meal ticket. It has some of the spunkiest and most graceful music Richard Rogers ever wrote, some wackily witty, leering lyrics (“The way to my heart is unzipped again”) by the late Lorenz Hart, and a number of dances that appear to be very hard on shoe leather but are plenty easy on the eyes. And it has a good, rowdy book.

As a matter of fact, it took Hollywood to prove how good the stage show really is. Almost everything that could be done wrong the moviemakers have done wrong in this production, and yet somehow the picture comes out remarkably right. The film oversanitizes Pal Joey’s original fun-and-gaminess and, what’s worse, imprisons the show’s vitality in a plaster cast. As the young love interest, Kim just trudges around in the well-known Novakuum, and Rita Hayworth, especially when she sings her big song (Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered), still sounds the siren, but where’s the fire?

The show is saved by Frank Sinatra, who does a tremendous job in the title role. Pal Joey was a hoofer in the play, and Sinatra does not dance a step in the film, but somehow he crowds the screen with rhythm every time he moves. Furthermore, he is a superb rhythm singer. Tense, rackety, jagged with energy, his rhythms pile up, break apart, flow and jolt with all the jeer and honk and curiously impersonal impulsiveness of rush-hour traffic. And nobody can turn a blue note green the way Frankie can−a green as sour and insolent as a pickle waved beneath the moviegoer’s nose.

Sinatra acts as niftily as he sings. He is the picture of the springiest heel that ever walked himself over and fell flat on his face, and the portrait was not an easy one to draw. The objection can always be made that Frankie is only playing Sinatra, a well-known Broadway character, but then he plays the part with complete conviction and a transcendent vulgarity. Outstanding example: When a woman turns him down, he gives her a long, level look that would boil ice, and says: “If you knew what you was throwin’ away, you’d cut your throat.”

Time Limit (Heath Productions; United Artists), based on the Broadway play (TIME, Feb. 6, 1956) and capably adapted to the screen by Actor-turned-Director Karl Maiden, is the best picture made to date on the subject of brainwashing. The presiding virtue of the film is that, unlike others of its kind (The Prisoner, The Rack, 1984), it does not prejudge its case.

The case in point is that of a U.S. Army major (Richard Basehart) who broke under Communist torture as a P.W. in Korea, signed a germ-warfare “confession” and gave propaganda lectures and broadcasts for the Communists. The major’s guilt is well attested to by his fellow prisoners−so well, in fact, that the case seems at first glance to be simply open and shut. But at second glance the G-3 officer (Richard Widmark) assigned to the investigation is made suspicious by the major’s refusal to defend himself, and by the curious circumstance that his crack-up came immediately after the mysterious deaths of two of his cellmates−deaths that are described by all the witnesses in words so nearly identical that the investigator begins to wonder if their stories have not been rehearsed.

In the end, the thread of evidence leads the spectator into a tangle of good and evil that, at the climax, seems almost as desperate and inextricable as life itself. Nor does the script attempt to cut the knot with a single grandly Alexandrian stroke. The major’s guilt, in a technical sense, is conceded, but the humanity of his motives is carefully entered on the balance sheet. The film concludes with a shrewd word of warning to all who feel impelled to judge the men the Communists broke: “Don’t be a hero on somebody else’s time.”

As cinema, the film is all too obviously a photographed play, but then the play is a pretty good one−the story is contrived, but well contrived. As polemic, the picture must primarily be judged on the points it makes, and on how well it makes them. As to that, Scriptwriter Henry Denker (who was co-author of the play) has included in the last scene of the picture a passage that can stand as a just and discriminating review. The major asks: “Do you think we can get the answers this way?” And the investigator replies: “Well, I can promise you one thing . . . They’ll know we asked the questions.”

Until They Sail (M-G-M), based on a tale from James Michener’s Return to Paradise, tells the story of World War II in the Pacific−but strictly from the woman’s point of view. To wit: while the men at the battlefront faced death, the women on the home front faced a fate that is reputedly worse than death. In New Zealand, where the story is set, they faced the U.S. Marines, who, shortly after the fall of Corregidor, arrived down under, and soon had the girl situation well in hand.

The picture dramatizes this situation by retailing the romantic affairs of four sisters. One sister (Joan Fontaine) started out prudish, wound up pregnant. Another (Piper Laurie) slept with everybody in sight and, when her husband found out about it, wound up dead. The third sister (Sandra Dee) was too young to know what she was missing, but the fourth (Jean Simmons) spends most of the picture painfully in love with an improbable marine (Paul Newman) who is afraid of love. In the end, as Hollywood’s puritanical code requires, he gets the girl because he didn’t take her−even though the reason he didn’t take her is one that seems to call for medical attention rather than moral approval.

The picture was apparently made in the expectation that aging veterans might like to relive a bit of their wartime past. And any man might be nattered by the suggestion that the girl he left behind was as winsome and intelligent as Actress Simmons. But few will enjoy being met, as the doors of memory open, by a whiff of old and rather dirty linen.