LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the Movies James S. Hamilton The Clock. The purest essence of Boy Meets Girl: he meets her in the Pennsylvania Station, he loses her in the subway, he finds her again under the Hotel...
...But nobody ever forgets she is a lowly domestic, and if they did she would have been the first to remind them...
...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...
...Family...
...A ride on the Fifth Avenue bus, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and ultimately dinner together—2 youngsters can get pretty well along towards knowing each other in the course of a program like that, discovering common tastes, similarities of background, drawn together by the fun they are having and the little adventures that happen to them...
...It seems as inevitable as life, more than the inevitability of a story's happy fade-out, that the whole thing finishes with a wedding...
...God Is My Co-Pilot—Dennis Morgan and Raymond Mas-sey in a filming of Colonel Scott's adventures with the Flying Tigers in China...
...Mature...
...Without having read Mar-cia Davenport's novel I can only guess at what was probably done to it to make it into a movie...
...Full of humor, good nature, and contemporary color, but overlong...
...Louis, but here he has the whole background of New York City to work with, and he has filled his picture with countless little touches of the friendliness of ordinary people in the vast rushing town...
...Greer Garson has a nice bit of brogue to distinguish her Mary Rafferty from all the other lovely and worthy ladies she has impersonated, but otherwise she is exactly what her host of admirers expect her to be...
...And there is the quickened tempo of wartime to speed things" up, the overhanging sense that the present is the only time one can be sure of...
...Hotel Berlin—Hasty melodrama of panicky Nazis dodging bombs and retribution...
...The purest essence of Boy Meets Girl: he meets her in the Pennsylvania Station, he loses her in the subway, he finds her again under the Hotel Astor clock...
...Family...
...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...
...Mary Rafferty Garson does all the deciding in this particular valley...
...A lot of people, conditioned by the happy endings of a million movies, are going to leave the theater comforted by the conviction that those two lovers so long parted, riding away in a carriage in the final scene, are symbolically intimating that the way to happiness has at last opened up for them...
...It is one of those productions that is absolutely studded with what is known among exhibitors as class, but every gem in it—and the gems are many and high-priced—shines only in relation to the central star...
...Together Again — Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in a skittish romance between a lady mayor and a sculptor, in which the younger generation gets involved...
...One of the most class-conscious heroines the screen has ever boasted...
...Pittsburgh and the steel industry back in the Carnegie days when trusts were aforming make a virile background for a story, and such things as labor unions, strikes, and strike-breakers actually have a part in the plot (almost a bit of daring for a popular movie...
...She doesn't for a moment suggest any humble origin, and that of course keeps her soundly in her own tradition...
...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...
...Family) * * * 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...
...It is also pretty snobbish...
...There is no sudden rush of romance, Judy not being the flirtatious type, but who could kick away a lost puppy who persists in sticking to your heels...
...am sure Miss Rafferty stuck to the dressmaking for which she had forsaken domestic service, and remained only the dependable friend and comforter...
...Family...
...All within 48 hours...
...Family) Meet Me in St...
...Family...
...Jessica Tandy and Gladys Cooper do something pretty fine in the way of characterizations, and all the men are first rate—Gregory Peck, Preston Foster, Donald Crisp, particularly...
...Mature...
...The Princess and the Pirate—Bob Hope mixes up with pirates in a rollicking costume farce...
...And Lionel Barrymore, still in a wheelchair but figuratively back in his best old stride again, is something to hurrah about as an embittered, fanatical labor leader...
...Family...
...Family...
...I put my 2 cents on its having been trimmed to fit Greer Garson, and anything that didn't go well with those measurements was out...
...A great deal of the warm reality of this little story comes from the director, and his unusual knack for making everything seem to happen as a part of an ever-moving tide of human life...
...Pretty soon she was practically running the family, and no important thing happened to the Scotts without her figuring somehow in it...
...A small-town soldier comes on a 2-day pass to New York, where he doesn't know a soul...
...Religion is unconvincingly dragged in, and the adventure part is only average...
...Vincente Mennelli did something of the kind in his Meet Me In St...
...But those hours are crammed with a combination of romance and city atmosphere that has a surprising lot of excitement to it for such a simple, almost idyllic, tale...
...Louis—Gay and hearty memories of not so long ago, excellent in songs and sentiment and remarkable in little Margaret O'Brien...
...Being Robert Walker he is an especially boyish kind of fellow, shy and eager at the same time, who couldn't possibly be suspected of wolfish intentions when he scrapes acquaintance with Judy Garland at the Penn Station escalator...
...It is a pretty vigorous picture as Tay Garnett has directed it...
...But it all manages to revolve around the Irish girl from the shanty district who entered the service of the rich Scott household as a maid...
...Family...
...Family) * * * The Valley of Decision...
...Mature...
...I'll Be Seeing You—A war-shocked soldier's readjustment to civilian life, warmly and sympathetically presented...
...Joseph Cotten, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple lead an all-round good cast...
...But I, for one...
...It kept her from marrying the eldest and best of the Scott sons, but not from becoming his chief inspiration and consolation...
...Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and Anne Revere (a new and refreshing movie mother...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 21
