The New Pictures

Major Barbara (Pascal-United Artists). George Bernard Shaw, 84 and the world's No. 1 living dramatist, did everything but grind the camera in this second authorized full-length screen version of one of his plays. He wrote its scenario and dialogue, brought the 36-year-old drama up to date with some 30 new scenes, supervised its direction, dominated its production. The result is a cinema treat.

Rarer is the separate starring vehicle which Shaw devised for himself. This is an eight-minute prologue in which the wily, bewhiskered old Celt appears on the screen to reveal that while the rest of the democratic world has been sleeping, he has been building his own arsenal of democracy. Impudent, goading, compassionate, it is a masterful bit of acting, unsurpassed by the performances which follow. Excerpts:

"Citizens of the United States of America . . . I am sending you my old plays, just as you are sending us your old destroyers. Our Government has very kindly thrown in a few naval bases as well. . . . If you had only known . . . you could have had those naval bases for nothing but your friendship. . . . In fact, if you would like a few more, say . . . on the West Coast of Ireland, well, we shall be only too glad to welcome you. . . .

"As you see, I am in my eighty-fifth year. I have shot my bolt, I have done my work. War or no war, my number is up. . . . When I was a little boy . . . I saw in the newspaper every day a column headed 'The Civil War in America.' . . . When I grew up they told me that that war . . . had abolished black slavery, so . . . I determined to devote my life as far as I could to the abolition of white slavery. . . . Look after my plays and look after my films. They are all devoted to the abolition of that sort of slavery." Although this thesis produces a lot of talk in Major Barbara, it is the kind of talk that cinemaddicts seldom hear--brilliant, provocative, richly comic. It is solidly backed up by a baker's dozen of superb acting performances. As the author's chief protagonist, lucent Wendy Killer (Pygmalion's Eliza Doolittle) is the Salvation Army major who believes that the pure in heart will inherit the earth, only to learn that the rich already own it.

Her rear-guard action against a benign monarchy of wealth is deliciously overwhelmed by her munitions-making father (Robert Morley), her agnostic sweetheart (Rex Harrison, George VI's double), and especially by an unreconstructible ruffian (Robert Newton), who very nearly runs away with the picture.

Fate can be as capriciously cruel to the movies as to any other business. The race to get Shaw's plays on film began with the handicap of the author's life expectancy. Then Miss Hiller, one of the cinema's few sensitive and commanding actresses and Shaw's favorite leading lady, fell prey to long, grave illness.

Then there was the war. Work on the script started two weeks before hostilities began. Shooting, scheduled for October, was held up until the following April because actors and technicians had suddenly become unavailable. There was a shortage of lumber for sets. Dunkirk over with, half the picture was in cans when the bombing of London began. Then the Nazis turned the Denham studio into a beacon--the point where their bombers swung toward London after crossing the Channel.

For months thereafter, bomb bursts, air-raid sirens and anti-aircraft fire made it impossible to make more than a few brief shots a day. Some of the cast lived on the set, passed much of the day in air-raid shelters and the night in A.R.P.

work. The camera communicates their state of mind in some of Major Barbara's unhappy sequences. It took 17 days to make a single shot of London's embattled Tower Bridge, and the completed sequence shows part of London's balloon barrage hovering in the sky. Once, when the company returned to complete a sequence begun on a street in London's East End, the houses had disappeared.

That these trials of the most turbulent 18 months in the history of Great Britain did not keep Producer Gabriel Pascal from turning out a polished and distinguished product is a transcendent Oscar in the onetime cavalryman's lap. The squat, fervent, irascible Transylvanian, determined to use his hard-won franchise on the world's richest mine of entertainment material, not only had to play cook & bottle washer but also had the redoubtable Shavian personality to contend with.

That was a task, as excerpts from their correspondence show: Shaw: "I forgot to tell you that you must not smoke big cigars. . . . If you lose your voice, you will lose all your authority in the studio. Your charm will be gone forever; and my plays will vanish from the screen. Try knitting instead.

. . . I have never smoked. . . . My singing voice, at 84, has not lost a note of its range and is no worse in quality than it ever was. . . . My father had a clerk--but I must not begin another story. He smoked himself into idiocy."

Pascal: "I have taken back all my heavy cigars, and exchanged them for very mild . . . ones. I no longer smoke at all during the day. . . . Very soon I shall only smoke . . . once a week. After that' I shall buy a pipe. . . ."

Shaw: "I have read the . . . scenes you . . . mapped out. You . . . must have got frightfully drunk . . . to conceive such a thing. Stephen and Cusins playing baccarat and Undershaft living like a second lieutenant just come into a legacy, with nautch girls all complete, is beyond the wildest dreams of Sam Goldwyn. . . . Unless you kept a copy it is dead."

Pascal: "Now, my dear archangel. . . ."

Shaw: "Do not let your time be wasted by attempts to get the agreement altered. . . . They must take it or leave it as it is. The more outrageously expensive it is the easier it will be to get the money. . . . And now what is the next film after Barbara to be? I want to know before I begin a new play. . . ."

Last week Producer Pascal was in Manhattan, basking in the kliegshine of Major Barbara's highly successful Broadway premiere. He was anxious to get back to England to start work on either his master's The Doctor's Dilemma or The Millionairess. Said he: "I have a life work--one hit after another-- only ready for me to make." The Reluctant Dragon (Disney-RKO-Radio) is billed as Walt Disney's fourth full-length cartoon movie. Actually, it is two and a half Disney shorts with Comic Robert Benchley and a conducted tour through the Disney works thrown in for good measure. Unlike its renowned predecessors (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia} it does not vastly expand the wonderful dreamworld which has flowed for 13 years from the inspired cartoonist's imagination.

Through the eyes of Mr. Benchley, as he stumbles through the Disney plant, Disneyacs can peek briefly into the bag of goodies in store for them. There are glimpses of a forthcoming full-length cartoon about a baby circus elephant named Dumbo whose enormous ears mortify him to tears until he becomes an overnight sensation by learning to fly with them; of another full-lengther, Bambi, and its leading man, a little white-tailed fawn; of Donald Duck down on the farm.

The reluctant dragon turns out to be a poetic green and yellow beast with the voice and mannerisms of Ed Wynn and a kangaroo shape. He is the Ferdinand of the dragons. The story of his reluctance to do battle with a toothy old English knight is not the most exciting Disney product. But nowadays the chief hazard to each new Disney show is the astronomically high standards of its predecessors.

The impression of this brief journey to Lilliput is one of awe for the invention, mechanical ingenuity, imagination and grinding labor that create Disney cartoons. From the intelligent, cheerful appearance of the creator's employes, it appears to be no secret to them how good they and their product are.

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