Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 27, 1958

Witness for the Prosecution (Arthur Hornblow; United Artists). "He's like a drowning man clutching at a razor blade." A famed British barrister (Charles Laughton) is referring to his feckless client (Tyrone Power). Indicted for the murder of a wealthy widow, the fellow faces a trial in which all the evidence—a will too timely altered in his favor, a maid who places him in the house on the night of the murder—is disastrously against him. His only hope is the testimony of his wife (Marlene Dietrich). But on the witness stand the wife declares that in the first place she is not his wife, and in the second place his story is a lie.

At this point the legal tangle begins to look painfully like a hangman's knot. But presto! The tangle turns into a cat's cradle of evidence that whodunit expert Agatha Christie, author of the long-running play on which the picture is based, manipulates with the skill and deft craftsmanship of long experience. The last scene is, as the British say, a basher.

Credits: to Director Billy Wilder, for his usual skillful job, and to Actor Charles Laughton, for an amusing piece of outrageous mugging. His John Bullge at the waistline is absurdly impressive, and his cranks and quiddities are sometimes elegantly sly Churchillustrations.

Pursuit of the Graf Spee (Powell and Pressburger; Rank) is a good sea story, not very well told; but there are moments when it holds, like a sea shell, the soundIng memory of the waves Britannia used to rule.

In 1939, just after World War II began, three cruisers of the Royal Navy (Ajax, Achilles, Exeter) sighted a dangerous German raider, the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, off the coast of Uruguay, and attacked. They had their nerve. The German was one of the most formidable ships afloat—a fact soon demonstrated. In little more than an hour the Exeter was wallowing out of action. But the other two cruisers, harrying the enemy like sharks at a whale, managed to hit where it hurt. The German commander (Peter Finch) withdrew into the River Plate, and docked at Montevideo. Prodded by the Allies, neutral Uruguay allowed the Graf Spee less than four days for repairs, and meanwhile the British spread rumors of a large (and largely nonexistent) fleet that had gathered to intercept the raider's escape. The Germans swallowed the bluff; Hitler himself approved the order to scuttle the Graf Spee. Britain had won the first significant sea fight of World War II.

The story is competently filmed in pretty Technicolor, and it is probably accurate from barnacles to binnacles, but it lingers too long over the details. The producers seem to have forgotten that in war pictures, as in true love, there is little to be said for long engagements.

Smiles of a Summer Night (AB

Svensk; Rank). On the subject of temptation, Martin Luther once said: "You can't prevent the birds flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair." With this for his text, Swedish Director Ingmar (Torment) Bergman*has preached in this picture a sermon on sensuality that the pastor of Wittenberg would scarcely have said amen to. But the Swedes, whose notions about sex have changed since Luther's time, were tickled pink with the picture. So were a lot of European critics: at