The New Pictures, Aug. 7, 1950

(2 of 2)

711 Ocean Drive (Columbia] is a gangster melodrama unconvincingly disguised as a documentary crusade against an $8-billion-a-year gambling racket. It was filmed, say its pressagents, under threats of violence from the underworld and with the protection of police. It begins with an endorsement by Wisconsin's Republican Senator Alexander Wiley, hailing it for informing the public "of the meaning of that innocent $2 bet at the candy stand." One point in the picture's favor: it is full of interesting electronic gadgets (e.g., walkie-talkies, relay amplifiers) illustrating the illegal transmission of betting information from the race tracks.

The documentary flavor, however, lends too little novelty to the story's rehash of familiar fiction; and for all its self-righteous airs, the movie does not practice what it preaches. The point of the action seems to be that a smart, ambitious telephone repairman (Edmond O'Brien) can cut himself in on the $8 billion if he applies his knowledge to the gambling racket. By hook, crook and electronics, Hero O'Brien works himself up to a high living standard, 36 changes of clothes and a love affair with another big shot's blue-blooded wife (Joanne Dru).

Then he overreaches himself, gets involved in double-crossing and murder, makes an enemy of the national gambling syndicate's gracious, cultured boss (Otto Kruger). The moral: crime pays handsomely, but greed does not.

Peggy (Universal-International) is a great waste of costly Technicolor and able actors. It sacrifices such good comedy performers as Charles Coburn and Charlotte Greenwood to a humorless, embarrassingly juvenile farce about the efforts of a professor's daughter (Diana Lynn) to escape coronation as queen of the Rose Bowl. For colored-postcard enthusiasts who sit it out, the last reel offers some views of Pasadena's Tournament of Roses.