(2 of 2)
The big moment of the binge comes when Joey walks into a cage, picks up a bat, starts swinging at baseballs spit out at him by a machine. Totally unconscious of the watching camera. Joey lashes out for dear life in a display of innocent animal vitality that creates one of the funniest, most beautiful passages ever to cross a screen.
By late afternoon, a weary little youngster washes down the final hot dog with the last Pepsi-Cola, and hurries off in search of a sign that, as he reassures himself by touching each letter quickly in succession with his forefinger, does indeed spell MEN.
How the little fugitive gets straight with society at last seems a pretty long story (75 minutes), but one that is always clearly and effectively told. In their first film, Writers-Directors-Producers Ray Ashley, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin have shown a high type of that negative good taste which knows what to exclude. At only one or two points do they slip into intellectualized sentimentality. For the most part, the camera modestly keeps its eye on Joey, and. except for a few embarrassing attempts to set him off in pathetic or tragic frames, looks at him calmly, with restraint and without cuteness. At the 1953 Film Festival in Venice, the picture won the Silver Lion, one of the six top awards.
The Big Heat (Robert Arthur; Columbia), like many another movie thriller, gets off to a fast start and then slows to a walk. An honest cop (Glenn Ford) defies his superiors by poking into the affairs of a big-shot gangster (Alexander Scourby) who seems implicated in a suicide. The bad men retaliate by planting a bomb in Ford's car. but blow up his wife (Jocelyn Brando) by mistake. Aided by Gloria Grahame. a lady of uncertain virtue who has been disfigured by one of the gangsters, Ford quits the police force and begins a one-man vendetta against Scourby that winds up in the usual litter of dead bodies and mass arrests. Since all the other characters are merely carbon copies from previous cops-and-robbers films, Gloria Grahame runs away with the picture by giving some complexity to her role of a female lush on the make for mink coats and high living.