LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies James S. Hamilton The Way Ahead—-When a wartime picture, made in wartime for a wartime public, turns out to be good enough, it is likely to become an historical document...
...There's a hodgepodge of a plot about a murder, a will, and the bags under Fred's eyes, and many a familiar bit from the Allenjadio shows, but the Allen touch is what holds it together, that nonsense that is so often a kind of sublimated commonsense, and the sting of wit which, if it ever let really loose, might be the sharpest satire America could laugh at without squirming...
...Anyone who has seen Reed's name on a film remembers it: there was Night Train, an adventure tale way up in the realms where Alfred Hitchcock has lorded it for so long, and The Stars Look Down, a drama of labor and capital in a mining community which didn't dodge its issues...
...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...
...It centers on a handful of men, young and older, drafted from diverse ways of civilian living—a business man, a mechanic, a playboy kid, and so on— and puts them as a platoon through the training that is to make them soldiers...
...Family...
...It is like serving up a warm, juicy steak under a thick slab of cold lard...
...The Dutch atmosphere is convincing and a novelty, and though the Nazis might have been grown in the same movie studios as Hollywood's, the confounding of them makes a good yarn for all-age boys who like adventurous intrigue with a touch of heroism...
...Watching how all this works is like going to war with someone you know intimately, so vividly have Eric Ambler in his script and Reed in his direction filled all the characters with hu-manness...
...The note at the end is that Englishmen, almost violently different in background and outlook at the beginning, have learned to work and fight together, and that they will walk the way ahead together in the same spirit...
...Anyway, Carol Reed knows how to put together about any kind of drama he sets his hand to, and most of all he knows all kinds of people and how to make tfiem alive on the movie screen...
...Their freshness gives them that much more reality...
...Family) * * * The Silver Fleet—The two men who made Colonel Blimp have in this film contented themselves with mere war adventure, but they haven't relaxed their skill...
...Family) The Enchanted Cottage—A longish but often touching search for happiness by a homely girl and a scarred veteran, who find that the heart often discovers beauties hidden from the eye...
...In advance it's enough to know that it's about a Dutch shipbuilder who worked with and against the Nazis when they invaded Holland, and that Ralph Richardson, one of England's finest actors, is in it...
...Mature...
...It is probably just as well that the whole cast, except David Niven...
...Competent players like Walter Slezac, David Bruce, and Rod Cameron surround a newly launched "star" named Yvonne de Carlo...
...Each man has to readjust himself to an uprooted existence, to new and strange companies in extraordinary intimacy, and to the aim of merging into a unified, compact fighting force-to learn unfamiliar efficiencies and to put instinctive, coordinated effectiveness into their use...
...Family) Hotel Berlin—Hasty melodrama of panicky Nazis dodging bombs and retribution...
...Niven, as the platoon lieutenant, moves with a serene air that deceptively hides the -kind of innate strength which makes so many Englishmen the force that they are, on a level of acting several planes above anything we have seen him do before...
...Mature) * * * It's In The Bag—People who don't like Fred Allen, if there be such, had better stay away from this, for it's Fred Allen and nothing but, though Jack Benny and Rudy Vallee and Victor Moore and Don Ameche give him amiable assistance...
...Though they have Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi to tempt them to an orgy of fantastic horror they have turned out something more than a mere horror melodrama...
...Eventually—in Africa—the group gets its dose of fire...
...All I actually remember of the original is the wild galloping through the storm with a corpse that seemed to be coming to life...
...Played expertly for excitement, tension, and human interest...
...For it is an indescribably warm and human picture...
...The kinds of things they do are factual—the way they are shown doing them is that kind of portraiture that gets inside personalities and reveals, humorously and touchingly, the vagaries and subtleties that make every single individual different from every other...
...Perhaps it had more substance than that—if it didn't have, Lewton and his collaborators have supplied it...
...Nussbaum...
...Some people are calling it a companion piece to In Which We Serve, doing for the British infantrymen what Noel Coward did for the Navy...
...It might be called a personalized document of the making of England's Army if that didn't sound too cold and dry...
...For some unhappy reason, ma*-be to create a fellow-feeling among Americans which the picture itself does superbly, the producers have attached a pompous and fat-headed prologue de-(Continued on Page 15) Light on the movies James S. Hamelton (Continued from Page 9) livered by Quentin Reynolds...
...Light on the movies James S. Hamilton The Way Ahead—-When a wartime picture, made in wartime for a wartime public, turns out to be good enough, it is likely to become an historical document —things like Desert Victory and The Fighting Lady...
...As a matter of fact it does a lot more, because Carol Reed directed it...
...Robert Young and Dorothy Maguire are helped in their search by Herbert Marshall, (Family...
...It also didn't get much of a showing in this country...
...The Way Ahead isn't a drama in any usual sense of the word—it is hardly even a story...
...J. Carroll Naish is the real star of a touching and significant story, surprisingly well assisted by Dorothy Lamour...
...Family) * * * A Handy Guide To The Best Current Films A Medal for Benny.—A tragi-comedy by John Steinbeck about the exploitation of war heroes, laid among the paisa-nos of southern California...
...Salome Where She Danced—A highly colored, extravagantly romantic melodrama of gold-rush days in California...
...Music For Millions—With Margaret O'Brien mothering her big sister for heart interest, Jimmy Durante and Hugh Herbert for laughs, and Jose Iturbi and a fine orchestra for excellent music, this is an all-round good show...
...And Mrs...
...Family) Counter Attack—Paul Muni as a Russian paratrooper buried in a cellar with a variegated lot of Germans who are his prisoners...
...Family) * * * The Body Snatcher—I didn't think I'd ever again be vouchsafed the fine creepy chills a kid gets when he first reads Robert Louis Stevenson's story of the "resurrectionists" in old Edinburgh— those ghoulish traffickers in newly buried bodies which they stole from graveyards and sold to medical schools for dissecting purposes...
...When The Way Ahead was finished some little time ago (and held up in its American release presumably by an odd notion that it was too British), it was practically contemporaneous: now it is a chapter in the record of the past—that past so sharply divided from the rest of time by V-E Day...
...A superior bit for those who enjoy goose-flesh...
...are unfamiliar to Americans...
...But the chills are still there, in the picture Val Lewton has derived from the Stevenson story, with some extra scares R.L.S...
...The shuddery happenings they picture have a convincingly historical authenticity in the ignorance of the times and the zealous passion of a doctor to learn how to cure the ills of the living by studying the bodies of the dead, which could be honestly come by only from the few unfortunates who died in the city poorhouse...
...And without the faintest smell of the snobbery that Noel Coward can't quite conceal with all his craftsmanship and carefully scented sophistication...
...would have given his shirt to have thought of...
...This doctor (played to the last turn of the screw by Henry Daniell) is someone you can't deny a certain kind of sympathy, and you can even understand why Boris Karloff's cat loved him, and watched, from the mantlepiece, his master's fight for life with more frenzied excitement than a fight-fan rooting for a knockout...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 25
