The New Pictures

The Song of Bernadette (20th Century-Fox) will doubtless be one of the box-office bingos of the new year. It may not be, as its producers gasp, "a motion picture so powerful . . . so majestic . . . so deep in its understanding . . . that for one immortal moment you touch the eternal truth . . . the final fulfillment... of everything you are . . . or ever hope to be." Nevertheless, it is a remarkably good moving picture--an improvement on Franz Werfel's reverent novel about the French peasant girl who saw the Blessed Virgin and, with her help, discovered a miraculously healing spring at Lourdes.

When Bernadette Soubirous first saw, or believed she saw, her shining Lady (1858), the local rationalists hauled her before the police, hired a psychiatrist for her, boarded up her healing spring, did everything possible to discredit her. At first only the primitive, the wretched, the poor, believed in her with the intensity of their massive, sorrowful faith. Bernadette's priest (Charles Bickford) found it painfully hard to believe her. The Roman Catholic Church was cautious, but at last was convinced, and Bernadette spent her last years in a convent.

Everything but Mammy. The Song of Bernadette lacks the razor-edged realism, the urgent poetry, the freshet-like creative vitality of great cinema or great religious vision. Sometimes its too high cinematic and religious gentility betrays itself awkwardly, as in the efforts of the cast to say maman (French for "mamma"), which is pronounced practically every way except mammy. But within its limits, most of The Song of Bernadette is reverent, spiritually forthright, dignified. The photography is continuously elegant. Most of the cast (especially Gladys Cooper as a Mistress of Novices) plays with unusual soberness and intensity.

As Bernadette, Newcomer Jennifer Jones (real name: Phylis Isley) makes one of the most impressive screen debuts in many years. It remains to be seen whether or not Cinemactress Jones can do in other roles the delicately dynamitic things she achieves as this little peasant saint. If she can, Hollywood should watch and guard Miss Jones as sedulously as the Church watched over Bernadette.

Lost Angel (M.G.M.) has for a month been fluttering shyly around the sticks because M.G.M. lacked confidence in its box-office aerodynamism. Reasons: the picture's lack of marquee names, the originality of its story. Lost Angel is a remarkably touching, tragicomic treatment of one of the world's sure-fire themes: the Misunderstood Child.

Based on an idea of Dance-Mime Angna Enters', Lost Angel is a fable about a foundling who is adopted by a platoon of psychologists, given the name of Alpha, and crammed to the scalp with Chinese, sociology, polysyllables, pure reason. At six, Alpha runs into a sentimental newshawk who is appalled when she says, of his sheet, "Reactionary, isn't it?" He is shocked when he finds she knows no fairy tales, has no childish belief in magic. On a tour of Manhattan he shows her magic in a sandwich man whose shirt front lights up, in an enormous neon dragon above Times Square, in the whistling convolutions of a popcorn machine.

By the time the tour is over, little Alpha is shoulder-deep in the reporter's difficulties with Torcher Marsha Hunt and with Gunman Keenan Wynn, whom she frightens by calling him "an anti-social type." Later she reforms the gangster by reading fairy tales to him. She also learns, and suffers from, the essential ingredient which the scientists left out of their graphs for the Perfect Child: Love. She falls hopelessly in love with the reporter, all but dies before he adopts her.

Lost Angel has its drawbacks. It stacks its cards pretty heavily against its well-meaning scientists. And Newshawk James Craig's kind of love is as limited in its own way as the kind of science which Messrs. Philip Merivale, Donald Meek, et al. represent. Yet Lost Angel is an important and lovely picture. James Craig, Marsha Hunt, Keenan Wynn and, above all, seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien as Alpha, make it often very moving.

The Song of Russia (M.G.M.) is Robert Taylor's farewell for the duration (he is now a naval lieutenant, j.g.). It is a cloudburst of Tchaikovsky. As a U.S. maestro, Taylor impresses his prewar Russian audiences by conducting the works of the master; as a Russian pianist, Susan Peters first impresses him by her slashing opening of the famed Concerto No. 1. They are married in her musical-conservatory village--Tchaikovskoye. There is time out for folk tunes and a brisk kazotsky. But they are beating out the Concerto once more the night before the invasion and, after a wartime separation, Tchaikovsky is resumed while Taylor searches the ravaged environs of Tchaikovskoye for his bride. As the picture ends they are sweating out the Concerto again, generating good will in the U.S.

Many U.S. soldiers find this naive propaganda one long howl of laughter. Many civilians may find bits of it acceptable. A Russian sentry (Konstantin Shayne) and an officer (John Wengraf) have short but very telling bits. The earthy, wooden, jigsawed village looks enough like home, to U.S. audiences, to be shocking in its devastation. And the music, vigorously conducted backscreen by Albert Coates, is a boundary-melting pleasure to hear.

Sweden's Middle Road (MARCH OF TIME) contains a number of sharp glimpses of balance between capitalism and socialism. U.S. citizens are likely to view these scenes of neutral Sweden with the odd fascination normally reserved for the craters of the moon. They will see, for example, the streets of a great city fully alight, while bombs shrill over the Berlin phone. They will see Dr. Hans Thomsen at the German Legation--The Enemy, as close up, startling sinister as if a tiger were suddenly to gaze in the window.

Quite as interesting are such pictured, unfamiliar facts about Sweden as 1) the conversion of automobiles into wood-burning vehicles (there is no gasoline whatever for Swedish civilians); 2) the conversion of wood pulp into shoes, garments, even fodder; 3) the conversion of more & more Swedes, with every Nazi defeat, to open espousal of the Allied cause. Only an estimated 5% today, remain neutral or pro-Axis in spirit.

In Our Time (Warners) earnestly dramatizes the collision between a resistible force (liberalism) and a movable object (feudalism). The place: Poland, just before World War II. When Polish Aristocrat Paul Henreid tells his family he intends to marry British Commoner Ida Lupino, his mother drop's and breaks a cherished teacup. They marry anyhow, and by the time the Nazis invade Poland the wife has turned her idle husband into a man, his estate into a solvent farm, his ancestral home into a one-night playroom for the peasants--who are delighted to have become sharecroppers. A reactionary uncle, on the contrary, shows his hand as an appeaser.

Because it is sincerely written and carefully acted, notably by Miss Lupino, and because Vincent Sherman is one Hollywood director who tries to make every shot count, In Our Time manages now & then to give domestic point to the political drama in the background. But much of it is too purely domestic, and some of it suggests a blunted, insensitive imitation of Chekhov.

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