The New Pictures

Lady in the Dark (Paramount] is $3,000,000 worth of free advertising for psychoanalysis and more than your money's worth of entertainment, if you can comfortably contemplate the id in Technicolor. In any case, this screen version of Moss Hart's Broadway hit is a munificent, ingenious show, as artificial, colorful and shakily pretty as a cathedral made of Jello.

Liza Elliott (Ginger Rogers), the frigid, tailored editor of a fashion magazine, works so hard at her job, and at her avoidance of life, that she is near breakdown. In her waking hours Editor Elliott 1) keeps snapping at the office pest (Ray Milland) who insists on calling her Boss-Lady, 2) cannot bring herself to marry her lover (Warner Baxter) when divorce at last sets him free, 3) is attracted, to her own bewilderment, by a massively masculine cinemactor (Jon Hall). Asleep, she has spectacular dreams, complete with music. She consults a psychoanalyst (Barry Sullivan). In just four interviews he cures her.

The waking hours of Lady in the Dark are sleek and engaging, with plenty of highly varnished dialogue and playing. Editor Elliott's dreams and the flashbacks to her youth come in every color of the rainbow and a few besides. She dreams (amid dry-ice mist and nacreous space) of getting a magnificent blue dress in which Mr. Milland paints her portrait--a cruel caricature of her old-maidishness. She dreams (in white and gold) of climbing a gigantic wedding cake while vast choirs shout her praises. She dreams (in candy colors) of a circus which turns into a trial, with a gibbering jury of freaks and clowns. In spite of some Freudian symbols which may make a few cinemaddicts jump, these dream sequences are not very dreamlike. But as production numbers they will make many a cinemaddict's eyes bug.

Cinemactress Rogers' role in Lady in the Dark is so rangily demanding that for one extraordinary moment Garbo was reported to be considering it. But Ginger Rogers is suitably dramatic as a lovely neurotic.

The Uninvited (Paramount) is a ghost picture as creepy as a rattlesnake ranch. The ectospasms begin shyly while London Composer Rick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland) and his sister (Ruth Hussey) are sitting in a vacant house on the Devonshire coast, wondering whether to buy it. While they talk, some roses they have brought along shrivel up quick-&-quietly as closing fans.

When the Fitzgeralds move in, their dog trembles, howls and "deserts them. Their cat claws the air and rips out a wailing snarl at nothing. Just before dawn they are awakened by the heartbroken sobbing of a woman, whom they cannot locate. And when they make friends with Stella (pretty newcomer Gail Russell), granddaughter of the man they bought the house from, candleflames wither, an odor of mimosa pervades the room, the young girl rushes out and is barely prevented from diving off a cliff. She cannot explain why. The answer, as Stella and the Fitzgeralds discover when they stage a seance, is that they are caught in the spectral cross fire of a pair of feuding nether worldlings. By the time the ghosts are laid, the scare-voltage is so high that the spooks seem as close to a nervous collapse as their victims.

Most chillers overcrowd the screen with werewolves or explain away all supernatural antics as the deliberate hocus-pocus of a mad scientist, estate-grabber or Axis agent. The Uninvited blends the everyday with the inexplicable, gets a lot of its best scares out of the everyday. The skittering of a squirrel across the drumhead floors of the vacant house suddenly gives vacancy a cold portentousness. The scraping of a wine glass against a table, during the seance, is more scary than the seance itself. The unexpected smashing of a window while you are watching a rather good Paramount ghost rasps the nerves like a splintered glass. The Uninvited is about the best case of the shakes anybody can buy during the liquor shortage.

Jane Eyre (20th Century-Fox) is a florid, somewhat disappointing cinemadap-tation of Charlotte Bronte's story about the long-suffering governess who finally marries Edward Rochester (Orson Welles), the melancholic and irascible squire with the mad wife. There is little success in capturing the Brontean intensity of atmosphere and of character which should have made the novel a natural screen romance. As Jane, Joan Fontaine is too often merely tight-lipped and pale--perhaps because Orson Welles so seldom gives her reason to be anything else. His Rochester is fairly amusing as a period-act; but an act is not acting and Novelist Bronte's Rochester is not meant to be amusing. For Cinemactor Welles to play Rochester as a man of ham, not of heart, wrenches the whole mood of Jane Eyre. But in the opening reels, little Peggy Ann Garner (as the child Jane), brilliantly abetted by Henry Daniell (as a demoniac preacher-schoolmaster), and by some loud-pedaled cinemaginativeness, establishes a nightmarish chiaroscuro of pity and gloom which, if sustained, might have made Jane Eyre a great picture.

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