Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 7, 1955

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Back comes the little boy with his mother. The captain hides. "Thank Providence!" the mother declares. "The last of Harry! Let's run home, and I'll make you some lemonade." Next, in startled succession, come the country doctor, a passing tramp, and the resident painter (John Forsythe), who calmly sits down and makes a sketch of the poor stiff. "Next thing you know," the captain splutters indignantly, "they'll be televising the whole thing." He and the painter fellow mull things over, decide to dig the hole for Harry together, and—after tea—they do.

Five minutes later, they are digging the body up again. The captain has discovered that his third bullet actually did kill the rabbit. "I think." he gasps, "that we are tangled up in a murder!" Half an hour later, they are digging him up for the second time. By this time. Harry is showing signs of wear, but Director Alfred Hitchcock is a man who understands that a good joke can't be kept down, and Harry does not rest in peace until he is ghouled for more giggles than he is really worth.

Horseplay with the corpse, and similar macabracadabra, has been a viable variety of humor in the human village since at least the Middle Ages, and few will seriously bother to accuse Hitchcock of bad taste. What he does sometimes invite in this picture is the charge of slack method. The comic pace often gets so slow that the moviegoer realizes he is, after all, at a funeral. The actors, too, sometimes behave pretty much like pallbearers, but the central idea is of such wormy charm that it takes more than an hour and a half to spoil.

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing [20th Century-Fox). One fine day when the century was young, and men of insight were wondering what the peekaboo waist might lead to. John Barrymore took a chorus girl named Evelyn Nesbit to supper. He ordered a glass of milk, and floating a rose petal on it. murmured seductively: "That is your mouth." Furthermore, he declared. "You are a quivering pink poppy in a golden, windswept space." John was a poor young cartoonist in those days, and all he could pay was compliments, but there were many wealthy wolves on the prowl at Evelyn's door. At 16, she had adorned the cover of Collier's magazine in the famous Eternal Question portrait by Charles Dana Gibson, and she was known to thousands as the prettiest piece of fluff in the big city.

Among Evelyn's admirers was Stanford White, 47, the most prominent American architect (Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, Washington Arch. New York University's Hall of Fame) of the day. and one of its leading quail hunters. One gaudy night, while Evelyn's mother was conveniently out of town. White blackly enticed the girl—or so she later testified —to a certain address on West 24th Street, which was entered through a secret door at the rear of a toy shop;. There, she said, he showed her into a room swathed in sound-stifling draperies from ceiling to floor, and containing a canopied bed with mirrors set in the top and sides. He offered her champagne. It tasted bitter. "When I became conscious again," she said later, "I didn't have any clothes on, and I was in bed." So was White. Evelyn screamed. "Be quiet," White told her. "It is all over now."