Legendary Atlantis may have been "enticing-exciting-exotic" as the billboards claim, but the movie "Siren of Atlantis" is not. This latest attempt to reproduce the "Lost Horizon" twist ends up in a dull, uninteresting, drab film.

All the ballyhoo about the charm of Atlantis is completely lost on the screen. All that shows up are dingy rooms, some standard modern dance routines that are supposed to be pagan rituals, several hooded cloak and dagger men, and Maria Montez. Unless you consider Maria Montez the most fascinating women who ever lived, which I do not, the Atlantic image falls let. Miss Montez carefully avoids any acting and just stares blankly like a hungry cow. She seeks charm by making her clothes from veils and by using a Spanish accent, but Jean Pierre Aumont triumphs completely in the battle of the accents, and all Maria has left are a few sexy poses.

The switch on "Lost Horizon" involves French Foreign Legionnaires instead of victims of a plane crush.

They turn up on the Sahara, where all good Legionnaires belong, get lost in that old sandstorm you remember from several other pictures, and wind up in mysterious Atlantis, Maria Montez rules this land with an iron bosom. She kills people right and left and has their bodies encased in metal for an interesting trophy room. Although she ensnares Jean Pierre Aumont, he manages to escape, and then tries to return for no better reason than to follow the "Lost Horizon" plot.

Aumont is fine as the dashing legionnaire, but nothing can save the ill-fated plot. "Siren of Atlantis" started with an original idea and developed it poorly.

Some of you may have thought that the Nineteenth Century mortgage melodrama was dead, but if so, you have sadly underestimated Hollywood's talent for reincarnation. "In "The Girl from Mauhattan," the second picture at the Pilgrim, the mortgage foreclosure appears with all its hideous threats and Dorothy Lamour as the hapless victim. But a few enticing twists have been added. The villain doing the foreclosing is, of all things, a church looking for a new site, and the hero is an all-American fullback turned minister. Dorothy Lamour, Charles Laughton, and George Montgomery are all involved in this hideous work. Mr. Laughton is the only one who even-struggled.