LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies James S. Hamilton I'll Be Seeing You. It wouldn't be easy to guess what sound substance is concealed behind this hit-song title, with all its radio echoes of nostalgic...
...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...
...Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and Anne Revere (a new and refreshing movie mother...
...It wouldn't be easy to guess what sound substance is concealed behind this hit-song title, with all its radio echoes of nostalgic sentimentality...
...This of course leads to romance, with inevitable complications to lengthen the story, and the usual happy end...
...Family...
...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...
...How much can even the kindliest, best-intentioned people understand of what the war has done to the minds and nerves of the men who come back from battles...
...Colonel Blimp—Handsome and entertaining coverage of the changes made by the years from the Boer War to the present in an English soldier-sportsman...
...This flamboyant bit of fantasy is in itself likely to strike people as rather unlikely, but on top of it is the utterly incredible fact that she was convicted in the first place...
...Family) * * * The Enchanted Cottage—Many a gentle tear will be shed over this touching fable by those able to believe, in this age of beauty parlors and plastic surgery, that a girl (especially Dorothy Maguire) can be so homely even soldiers shun her at a USO dance and a returned veteran like Robert Young can bear such scars that his own mother looks upon him with more horror than pity...
...Joseph Cotten was a lucky find for the soldier's part—he fills it, enlightens it, with life...
...But it is not the usual romance—the important thing is something else, the every-day reality of most of the happenings, though the plot-maker tried to do something out of the ordinary which gives the picture its one streak of phoni-ness: Ginger Rogers— the girl—is also on leave, but from a prison where she is serving a sentence for manslaughter...
...As for Dorothy Maguire—sincere and lovable—she could easily have been the belle of the village with only a bit of help from a good hair-brush and a mud-pack...
...Shirley Temple is rather out of her depth in a pretty difficult role on whom much depends, where the old-time cuteness is not enough...
...There is, moreover, a blind musician nearby who in the person of Herbert Marshall is as good as several doses of soothing syrup for inducing an atmosphere of thick sweetness...
...All the others are as right as if they had stepped straight out of the family photograph album...
...Family...
...A movie that sticks closely to a play has a way of showing up the play's weak spots, if there are any, and it does just that in this case...
...Mature...
...Undeniably there is a message of deep spirituality in this picture, but its reiteration eventually has something of the effect of a patient invalid awaiting the reward for suffering in a happier land...
...Louis—Gay and hearty memories of not so long ago, excellent in songs and sentiment and remarkable in little Margaret O'Brien...
...Bette Davis, sensible and competent actress that she is, makes no attempt to duplicate the Barrymore performance...
...The soldier is the actual center of interest...
...The picture is warm and understanding—and sometimes painfully vivid— about these things, and surrounds all with an uncommonly genuine atmosphere of American town and American family...
...Mature...
...Coming into an ordinary American family at holiday time, he creates a situation that is a miniature of problems that are going to visit countless homes in the days to come...
...But something less strained would have done much better...
...At loose ends, without ties of home or friends to pull him in any particular direction, he gets off the train at a certain town for no other reason than that a girl with whom he has been chatting gets off there, and he has nowhere better to go...
...Mature) * * * A Handy Guide To The Best Current Films A Royal Scandal—Handsome comedy of Catherine of Russia and one of her minor amours, spun out too long, with Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Coburn in grand comic vein...
...Full of humor, good nature, and contemporary color, but overlong...
...Family...
...He is on furlough from a hospital, an experimental leave to find out how he gets along on his own, not under observation...
...Family...
...Meet Me in St...
...Its story of a school-teacher in a Welsh mining village, and her battle with ignorance and prejudice to equip a talented boy for the career toward which his native gifts pointed, had a theme that its author obviously felt was truly inspirational, but his zeal of craftsmanship led him into dramatic devices that turned out to be pretty contrived and theatrical...
...Successful as a play and then as a silent movie after the last war, and built upon the idea that the heart sees more truly than the eyes, there is something remote and ghostlike about this little story...
...Ginger Rogers has to be a bit subdued for Ginger, but she does a lot to make the paroled girl temporarily believeable...
...Robert Young comes back from the war so disfigured that his fiancee is glad to be released from her engagement to him...
...She takes the part as written and plays it from within—no organ stops, no outpourings of charm—the ageing, idealistic spinster, sharp edges, brittle surface, hints of strong feelings held in restraint by years of self-discipline, a figure she does a fine job of clothing in flesh and blood...
...Feeling like an outcast, he eventually finds comfort and love in a plain-faced girl who is a servant in the "enchanted" cottage—enchanted because it has been a honeymoon cottage and is pervaded by an aura of peace and happiness which is intensified by a housekeeper who somehow gives the impression of being a medium capable of bringing almost anything from out of the shadows...
...It is obvious enough that this slick bit of plotting was devised to make an opposite for the hero, to make the 2 be drawn together by their special isolations and their similar problems of readjustment...
...The picture has a solid and important basis in a situation which it handles honestly and sincerely—a war-shocked soldier trying to adjust himself back into normal civilian life...
...Family) * * * The torn Is Green—Ethel Barrymore has toured up and down the land in this play, warming it with her peculiar radiance into something that seemed a good deal better than it really was...
...And it does arouse a troubling thought: does the Army really send its battle-scarred soldiers back into civilian life so nerve-shattered and so like a product of Frankenstein's operating chamber...
...Hotel Berlin—Hasty melodrama of panicky Nazis dodging bombs and retribution...
...There is a lot of Welsh singing that is pretty swell, but otherwise the Welsh atmosphere is spotty and synthetic...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 20
