LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies James S. Hamilton Colonel Blimp—Ambitious, lengthy, and generally brilliant, this English film was originally called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a character patterned...
...Family...
...For the most part the picture operates in the realm of high comedy, and barely escapes sharp satire by being extremely good-humored in the way it handles idiosyncrasies...
...But the whole thing doesn't make much sense, even on its own peculiar level...
...This may be a bit over-refined to compete with zombies and Draculas and Wolf-men, but many people are likely to fall for the producer's pretentions to literariness, artisticness, and daring...
...Ray Milland and some good creeps...
...Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo—Capt...
...Errol Flynn submerges himself in a uniformly good cast in one of Hollywood's best war films...
...The Suspect — Charles Laughton kills off a pestiferous wife and almost gets away with it...
...This lady, an actress high in party favor, two-times once too often and gets shot by an undergrounder...
...Objective Burma — An American paratroop mission against the Japs, with remarkably good factual detail and no romantics...
...Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and Anne Revere (a new and refreshing movie mother...
...Family...
...Even so, the film has a lot of significance as a picture of its times, and is ahead of all other films so far in containing a decent German, honestly and sympathetically presented...
...A minor informer, on the other hand (Faye Emerson of recent headline fame), is rewarded with a new pair of shoes for her fast-and-looseness...
...Thunderhead—The son of Flicka—and a beautiful horse he is—saves the ranch for Roddy MacDowell and family in a picturesque juvenile...
...Gorgeous and incongruous...
...None But the Lonely Heart—Sincere and poignant insight into the lives of the London poor, with a superlative cast headed by Ethel Barrymore and Cary Grant {Mature...
...And as such, carefully attempting to re-create the sybaritic elegance of Yellow Book London society, it is presented on the screen with more reverence than excitement...
...But when it gets to the present war, the picture fritters away in a confused practical joke to teach the Colonel his lesson...
...From the Boer War till now, which may seem like a century but is less than half of that, Clive Candy (the Colonel) fights in the British Army and hunt's big game all over the world...
...This silk-hat Narcissus is very distantly related to Frankenstein's monster, since the blame for his wickedness is put upon (1) the artist who painted the portrait, or (2) the amoral philosophy of his...
...transfer to a portrait of himself all the outward ravages of a life of unrestrained evil...
...On the whole there is nobody in the picture to like or admire enough to care much what happens to them...
...Mature...
...National Velvet—A warm and enjoyable story of an English family and how an enchanting little girl's dream of -winning the big steeplechase came true without hurting her common sense...
...The Princess and the Pirate—Bob Hope mixes up with pirates in a rollicking costume farce...
...Family...
...Raymond Massey has finally been caught up with as the only surviving general who tried to assassinate Hitler, and he lets any chance to escape slip away by waiting around for his mistress to decide whether it is worth while to go with him...
...Family...
...Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson, and some heart-winning Chinese are especially good...
...If this is a bid for a place in the world movie market, the English have stepped out with an extravagantly good production, top-notch Technicolor, and some of their very best players, including Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook...
...Family...
...The picture is at its most successful in the sprinklings of Wilde epigrams—not so sparkling these days-—which George Sanders carries off with rather magnificent aplomb...
...Tonight and Every Night—London blitzes brought to a musical comedy level, with Rita Hayworth and a swell new dancer named Mark Piatt...
...The top Gestapo man gets thrown down an elevator shaft, but two others start off for North America to plant seeds for the next war...
...Mature) * * * The Picture of Dorian Gray—Oscar Wilde's embroidered variation on the Faust theme (a man getting his wish to be always young) has settled down among the reprints as a minor near-classic, but it could hardly survive a Hollywood translation except as a kind of horror film...
...For Candy goes unofficially to Germany to see what he can do about the propaganda the Germans are promoting against the British in South Africa and gets involved in one of their ritualistic duels...
...Maybe they couldn't make up their minds...
...This Man's Navy—Pleasant camaraderie between Wallace Beery and James Gleason in spectacular if implausible wartime goings-on...
...Here was a whole field of hidden mines waiting to explode some day, but the picture doesn't uncover them: it keeps an easy-going comic spirit flitting over the surface and leaves the inferences to the historians...
...The whole plot revolves, rather dizzily, around a young man from the underground whom the Gestapo chases all over the hotel, and in anything like real life he would have been snapped up in half a second, along with the underground bellboy—a guiltier-looking pair never were rescued by the contrivances of a scriptwriter...
...Murder My Sweet—Dick Powell forsakes musical comedy to be a fresh kind of detective in a Raymond Chandler mystery formerly called Farewell My Lovely...
...Lawson's part in the Doolittle bombing reported with almost documentary faithfulness, with his home life to add a realistic domestic contrast...
...The excellent character studies lift it above a mere murder story...
...Anyway, the portrait, sprouting warts like a decaying summer squash, brings him retribution...
...The basting threads still show, and they don't always keep it from falling apart...
...friend Sir Henry...
...Family...
...They have overdone it in length, and blurred their message, but they aimed high in the gallery of intelligent entertainment, and hit what they aimed at, (Family) * * * Hotel Berlin—The odd lot of variously "unpleasant people congregated in the Nazi-ridden hostelry that gives this picture its title have much worse troubles than the bombs which keep sending them down into the shelters...
...Light on the movies James S. Hamilton Colonel Blimp—Ambitious, lengthy, and generally brilliant, this English film was originally called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a character patterned after David Low's blistering cartoons of the reactionary military has-been...
...In the quiet home intervals he is haunted by the memory of a girl he would have married if she hadn't chosen a handsome German officer instead...
...Peter Lorre is a drunken scientist who turns up surprisingly in the underground at the end, sober, cleaned up and full of nothing but emotion as he reads a Yalta proclamation about good Germans and bad Germans, which seems intended to be the message of the film...
...Family...
...It all seems to have been thought up in a hurry, and basted together even faster...
...The Ministry of Fear—A spy mystery growing out of a young Englishman's casual purchase of a cake at a fair...
...British diplomacy of the pre-war type gets some pretty caustic treatment, and the Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm's day would be a grim forecast of things to come if it weren't so full of laughs...
...The House of Fear—One of the better Sherlock Holmes episodes, the one about the orange pips...
...But the people who made the picture obviously got too fond of him to kill him off, or even to make him ridiculous, and were content to make him learn late in life that modern wars are not fought by sportsmen's rules and that our present enemies can't be treated like gentlemen of the old school...
...This gives the picture its one pleasantly romantic note, and provided Deborah Kerr—an actress of both physical and intellectual charm—¦ with 3 nicely varied parts in as many generations...
...Family...
...Cruelty, murder, blackmail, and hinted-at unmentionables recorded themselves hideously in his picture while he himself stayed miraculously unchanged...
...Mature) * * * A Handy Guide To The Best Current Films A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—A fine and sensitive dramatization of a generous section of the popular novel, with outstanding acting all around and superb direction...
...Family...
...Keeping the flowery Dorians and Adrians and Basils, but discarding all of Wilde's serious examination of living solely for pleasure, it tells the tale of an extraordinarily beautiful young man who was enabled to...
...Family...
...Mature...
...With the coming of World War I the shape of the future begins to loom in definite outline, and the Blimpness of the Colonel to show up as a danger...
Vol. 9 • April 1945 • No. 15
