LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies James S. Hamilton HOLLYWOOD appears to be as confused as other people about what to do now the fighting is over. There are war pictures in the vaults: do audiences want to see...
...She, poor girl, is a stenographer being tempted from Tenth Avenue to a pent house by propositions from a wicked business man...
...They seem to like The Story of G. I. Joe and Pride of the Marines pretty well—they ought to if they like good movies...
...Ex-soldiers still crop up often among the other characters—like Van Johnson in the extravagantly opulent Weekend at the Waldorf...
...It's'a bit strange to find this almost clinical account of an alcoholic getting into the movies at all, stranger still to find it done so extremely well...
...The parts played by the Hollywood actors are the same old types, but J. Edgar Hoover should have no kick about the way his Federal Bureau of Investigation has been starred...
...Paired off against these two are a comparatively cheerful couple, Ginger Rogers, a super-resplendent movie star whose career has gone stale on her without love, and Walter Pidgeon, a world-weary war correspondent in somewhat the same fix...
...There are war pictures in the vaults: do audiences want to see them ? Maybe some of the unreleased films are the best of all...
...Coward's frothiest best...
...His sad predi-eament is that he is faced with a serious operation which he won't have any desire to survive unless Lana Turner loves him...
...Not a bit old-fashioned, but seriously modern, is The Lost Weekend...
...But the talk is Mr...
...And a lot of these movie-makers have been far, far from Hollywood since '41...
...Its most important asset is the return of Joan Crawford, who has been waiting for a couple of years for a good part to turn up for her...
...She manages—which has a miraculous aspect—to make you forget how foolish she was to endure so much...
...She is helped, of course, by a crafty all-round production, and particularly by good performances by Jack Carson and Zachary Scott...
...Ranging from top directors, like John Ford (The Battle of Midway and the still unreleased They Were Expendable), William Wyler (The Memphis Belle), Garson Kanin (The True Glory), Frank Capra (the Why We Fight series for the armed services), down through writers and technicians and the whole infinite variety of skilled workmen it takes to make a movie, they have had their observation, their thinking and their feeling broadened far beyond what their pre-war jobs called for or wanted...
...The West Coast producers were learning fast—and they are smart enough to learn—how to bring the war home to those far from the front...
...Are these men going back to Hollywood with minds and outlooks shrinking back into the old limits, content to live and create in the same dream-world from which the war snatched them...
...With the files, and authentic operations of the FBI to draw on he has given a rather ordinary spy story something more than such a bit of melodrama usually gets...
...But do the home folks want to look at any more war movies...
...Meantime the on-coming pictures happen mostly to be gap-bridgers— when they have not gone all the way escapist...
...But the movie-makers must have learned something about their own power in those years—how tremendously they can teach, persuade, change people's thinking...
...Duffy's Tavern is a quite different institution, with a few discharged veterans only dimly visible in the background of its skimpy little plot...
...Love, in fact, seems to be as indispensable at the Waldorf as anywhere else, in spite of more realistic grandeur to comfort lonely hearts than even the movies have dreamed up before...
...And love does indeed conquer all...
...But these two pictures are perhaps something special, along with The True Glory, that splendid documentary of Eisenhower's invasion and fight to victory that in many ways seems likely never to be surpassed...
...Made by an English company, with Margaret Rutherford, Rex Harrison and Kay Hammond as unfamiliar but hiVhly amusing members, it is a gay poke at spiritualism, more talkative than dramatic...
...Mildred Pierce seems a bit old-fashioned by comparison—a hefty tale of sacrificial motherhood and murder, done to a turn in its theatrical style...
...For those indifferent to the comic charm of Duffy's man Archie (Ed Gardiner) there are skits with Betty Hutton, Bing Crosby and other Paramount stars that would be top-notchers in any first-rate vaudeville...
...So Hollywood is ransacking the market for stories that will make folks forget what they have been through in the last few years...
...The House on 92nd Street (very much war) is LoUis de Rochemont's try at pepping up documentary in his March of Time style with an exciting plot...
...She has it here, so far as acting chances go, and she uses it with fine authority, understanding and effectiveness...
...THE pictures that are now in the planning stage will give some indication...
...SWINGING far away from any hint of war is Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward's sprightly examination into the case of a man whose second began suddenly to be haunted by the ghost of his first wife...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 43
