Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 19, 1954

The New PicturesLiving It Up (Paramount) is a screen version of Hazel Flagg, the Broadway musical, which was in turn a retuning of filmdom’s famous Bronx cheer for Manhattan, Nothing Sacred (1937) Jerry Lewis now plays Carole Lombard’s movie part. Alas, Carole was prettier. She was also funnier. And Janet Leigh, playing the old Fredric March part, adds body to the fun but no flavor. Somewhere along the production line the rasp has been strained out of the raspberry, but what’s left is still the pleasantest session with Jerry Lewis and Partner Dean Martin in more than several.

Things get going in Desert Hole, N. Mex. (elevation 1 ft.), where Jerry is the flag-stop-station attendant and Dean is what barely passes for an M.D. One day Jerry, stranded in the desert, spots a used-car dump and goes helling home in a rod that is hotter than he knows—a car used to test the effects of radiation in an atomic explosion at nearby Los Alamos and still labeled “Radioactive.” Actually, the contamination has worn off. but when Jerry sees the label he collapses, and Dr.

Martin, somewhat confused by the radium dial of Jerry’s watch, diagnoses radiation poisoning.

The good doctor realizes his mistake a couple of days later, but by that time the fathead is in the fire. Janet Leigh, a New York reporter, has convinced her editor that it would make a great sob story if the paper granted Jerry his last wish: “to see New York before I die.” Janet makes her proposition to Jerry, and Dean doesn’t have the heart—he has lost it to Janet at first sight—to disillusion her.

Off they all go to New York, and the big city opens its heart to the poor boy, after some fumbling with the combination.

Mayor Edward Arnold does the old frock-coat routine, the tabloids turn on the tear hydrants, the crowds rise in tribute at a World Series game while a soprano executes You Are the Bravest, a nightclub goes so far as to dedicate its floor show to the doomed waif.

And so it goes until, of course, it doesn’t go. “New York,” somebody says, “is tired of how he’s hanging on”—and Jerry submits to a state funeral in return for a job on the street-cleaning force.

Dean, as in all his recent pictures, gives the impression of a man consciously restraining an enormous talent in order to give his partner a chance, but Jerry, for a change, has done a little work on his part. He has a real wingding with Sheree North in a jive dive and some nice nonsense of drinking champagne through a stethoscope. Best bit: Jerry, hung over and feeling awful, catches the boiled eye of his basset hound, who looks worse; with a groan, Jerry gives the dog his own ice pack.

Garden of Evil (20th Century-Fox) is a western for farsighted people. The foreground—in which four hombres (Gary Cooper, Richard Widmark, Cameron Mitchell, Victor Manuel Mendoza) trail off after a pert little gold digger (Susan Hayward) in search of gold or whatever else may be in them thar hills—is hardly worth looking at. But the background, the Mexican landscape, is one of the grandest the world has to show, and the gates of the CinemaScope camera are flung wide to show it all.

For three months a team of 300 actors and crewmen labored in Central Mexico while Photographers Milton Krasner and Jorge Stahl Jr. collected footage of banana jungles the color of sweating emeralds, hotplate plains of black volcanic sand, pine woods as cool and blue as Maine’s, and among them all, poetic pink and yellow ruins of the Spanish reign. These jarring contrasts are steadied together in the film, as they are in nature, by the heavy mother colors of the land beneath them and by the white-hot pressure of the sky above. At any rate, largely thanks to CinemaScope, this picture is well worth seeing for its wealth of photographic beauty.