The New Pictures, Jan. 5, 1948

The Senator Was Indiscreet (Universal-International) offers some useful hints on how to become President of the U.S.

In the first place, the U.S. is a land of such glowing opportunity that no candidate need bother to have a brain. Senator Melvin G. Ashton (William Powell) cannot even spell—but, with the help of a smart pressagent (Peter Lind Hayes) and a bit of blackmail, he very nearly makes the White House.

The Senator’s speech of acceptance is such a model of reluctance that one opposition paper headlines it: ASHTON BACKS INTO PRESIDENTIAL RACE. When his party boss (Ray Collins) tells him where to get off, he demurely mentions a diary in which, during 35 years of party hacking, he has noted down “Everything”—even What Happened in Boston; yes, even What Happened in Denver. After that The Boys do not hesitate to get behind him heart & soul.

On a triumphal tour of the nation, the Senator does practically everything an unwilling aspirant can do, except milk a cow. In Virginia he uses a mushmouf accent; in Texas he lines it with rawhide. In a union hall, wearing a miner’s cap, he shouts for an eight-day wage, a two-day week; at a discreet banquet for bankers, he whispers for a two-day wage, an eight-day week. Elsewhere, discussing the problems of inflation and deflation, he takes his stand fearlessly, without compromise, “For Flation.” He also picks up an honorary Ph.D. from the Edgar L. Eubanks College of Animal Husbandry and Modern Fertilizing Methods.

The wordy script is often highly entertaining; yet some of the sharpest stuff is purely visual. (Most wicked shot: the union hall, dominated by a gigantic photograph of The Leader, beneath which the platform officials, wearing their hats, recall the hardest of the old gangster pictures.) The Senator is a collaboration by a trio of expert funmakers: Producer Nunnally Johnson, Director George Kaufman and Scripter Charles MacArthur. There is also an unusually sassy musical score by Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Much of The Senator’s impudence toward politicians and politicking would probably seem rather thin on the stage, or in print. But it is so rare to see any national institution really slapped around, on the screen, that the picture seems not only very funny but very audacious.

Captain from Castile (20th Century-Fox] is a big, bright-colored packaging of Samuel Shellabarger’s best-selling historical novel about the era of Cortes. Tyrone Power keeps a medium-tight rein on his passionate Spanish nature; Lee J. Cobb is a boozer who likes disguises; Cesar Romero—a rather thin Stout Cortes—wears a rich black beard. Newcomer Jean Peters plays a pretty, vacuous runaway barmaid who is described, enthusiastically, as “a wench for the New World.” Thomas Gomez, in priestly robes, puts forward a few ill-chosen words in favor of the conquest of Mexico (something a few centuries too soon, for a churchman of imperial Spain, about the happy day when all men, even Indians, will be equal).

The story is involved with honor, baseness, torture, swordplay, quite a good chase, and some polite bows toward history. During the early reels, the movie has the pleasing style and flow of pretty good ersatz-Dumas. But once everyone moves from Spain to the New World, it becomes as tired and lumpy as an ill-packed Christmas stocking.

Much of Captain was shot in Mexico, and many of the backgrounds are beautiful. It was made with the help of Mexican archeologists, and some of the aboriginal costumes are smashingly magnificent.

Most believable shot: some large dogs, required by the script to squabble brutally over a tablecloth, start patching up their differences as if they had never even glanced at the script—much less heard of the Johnston Office.

High Wall (MGM) is a smooth-running, standard-model “psychological” thriller. Like most such vehicles, it is started by crime, driven by suspense and, at the end, parked down the Old Ox Road. Psychology, which expresses itself in trite psychiatricks, is just a gabby passenger.

A pilot (Robert Taylor), home from Burma, finds his wife unfaithful. The other man (Herbert Marshall), for business reasons, murders the lady and frames her husband. Pilot Taylor, arrested and committed to an insane asylum for observation (his head was once injured in a plane crash), falls for his pretty psychiatrist (Audrey Totter). She helps him—with an injection of sodium pentothal, the “truth drug”—to wring a confession from the real killer.

Director Curtis Bernhardt injects some chill realism into this warmed-over stuff: Actor Marshall’s wooden leg* mercilessly gaped at by the camera, and the asylum staff ignores fear-crazed Pilot Taylor as callously as an entomologist might ignore the struggles of a pinned-up bug.

In other scenes that are difficult to sit through, the film crassly exploits mental patients for slapstick comedy.

*Acquired in World War I, when he was a private in the British army.