Cinema: The New Pictures, may 26, 1958

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Ten North Frederick (20th Century-Fox). Sex is the fire of life to Author John O'Hara, and through the fire his characters must pass to their destruction or salvation. But sex, at the rate O'Hara burns, is way too hot for the average U.S. movie exhibitor to handle; and so the producers of this picture, based on O'Hara's latest bestseller (TIME, Nov. 28, 1955), have carefully put out the fire with a steady stream of eyewash -most of it, as a matter of fact, squeezed out of the soggier sections of the book.

The hero is Joe Chapin (Gary Cooper), leading citizen of "Gibbsville," a small town in Pennsylvania, "a gentleman in a world that has no use for gentlemen." Decent, limited, middleaged, he is as set in his honorable ways as any samurai in his Bushido. and step by inevitable step the story describes how he is driven to commit what might be called O'Hara-kiri -he drinks himself to death.

Joe's first mistake is the decisive one. He marries an ambitious woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald), a sort of Lady Macbeth of Main Street who convinces him that he belongs in the White House. A sensible man, Joe has his doubts, but he throws his hat in. the ring -and $100,000 with it. The professional politicians gratefully scoop-up the $100,000, but blandly hand Joe his hat and show him the door. Joe feels pretty foolish, but he feels worse than that when he comes to understand the crimes he has committed in the name of power. He has broken up his daughter's love match with a trumpet player, and let his wife put the girl (Diane Varsi) through what looks suspiciously like an abortion. He has twisted his son's life by forcing the boy (Ray Stricklyn) to give up his music and go to Yale. And he has wasted his own life by spending it with a woman he does not love. And she? "I've wasted my life on a failure!'' she screams.

After that, is there anything left for Joe Chapin? O'Hara being O'Hara, there is sex, and Joe has it with his daughter's roommate (Suzy Parker) when he goes to New York on a business trip. And after sex? A little whisky fills the aching void, and then a little more . . .

In the book the message was clear, if not original: middle-class morality is enough to drive a man to drink. In the movie the message is sometimes hard to decode, but it seems to contain two arresting ideas: 1) Suzy Parker is a charming young actress, and 2) Gary Cooper is getting a little old (57) for love scenes.

The One That Got Away (Rank). Hitler's was an evil war, but many brave men fought his battles. In this picture, the British pay a graceful and entertaining tribute to one of them, a 26-year-old

Luftwaffe lieutenant who called himself "Baron" von Werra and claimed he had bagged at least 13 British planes before he was shot down over southern England in 1940. When the British disdainfully disproved about half of Von Werra's claims, he only laughed and proposed a wager: "A magnum of champagne against ten cigarettes that I escape in six months."