The New Pictures

Dark Waters (United Artists) has all the makings of a first-class thriller and now & then seems likely to become one. But the grade-A eggs it breaks never quite make an omelet.

Its heroine (Merle Oberon), arriving in New Orleans after harrowing exposure in the lifeboat of a torpedoed ship, starts the picture quavering with a nervous breakdown, and soon involves herself in circumstances calculated to pass it on to her audience. She moves upstate, for a rest cure, to a quiet old sugar plantation, run by an uncle & aunt (John Qualen, Fay Bainter) whom she has never seen before. Also on hand are: a chenille-voiced character named Mr. Sidney (Thomas Mitchell), who seems to have some curious authority over her genteel relatives; an overseer (Elisha Cook Jr.), who starts courting her with all the cozy intimacy of a vampire bat; and a local physician (Franchot Tone) who, somewhat to the detriment of the picture, is obviously a man she can depend on.

Mr. Sidney and the overseer are obviously sinister from the start; little by little the aunt & uncle begin to seem queer to her too. In the most promising stretch of the picture, as she flinches in terror of groaning shutters and sudden extinctions of the lights, or follows the beckoning of inchoate voices into the swamp, it is as impossible for the audience as for the victim to know what is plain fact, what is the hallucination of a crumbling mind, who if anybody is to be trusted.

While the participants in this witches' Sabbath are busy at its quieter passages, they make rather a good thing of it. The fustily ornate interiors of the mansion, with their finely caught gloom even in bright daylight, are exciting without help from anyone. Yet Dark Waters fails because its story, its characters and its scarey ideas seldom get beyond the blueprint stage. In this kind of melodrama, which depends strongly on atmosphere and psychological overtones, absolute belief is indispensable. Sample oversight: the failure effectively to suggest the peculiarly oppressive, damp heat of the locale.

And Now Tomorrow (Paramount), Alan Ladd's first picture since his discharge from the Army, presents Loretta Young as a deaf New England mill-town patrician and Mr. Ladd as the doctor who works to cure her deafness. Her deafness is figurative as well as literal. In its literal aspect, being merely the result of meningitis and the despair of specialists the world over, it offers no insuperable difficulty. Figuratively, it is a more stubborn case.

Miss Young is wholly incapable of catching the wretched undertones which hum between her fiance (Barry Sullivan) and her sister (Susan Hayward), who love each other. She is also a born snob, insensitive to the rumblings of proletarian Shantytown as conveyed by her doctor, who was born there and will never forgive her for it. Since the doctor spends most of his time snarling at her, as she can readily discern by reading his lips, she is perhaps less to be blamed for not realizing that he loves her.

This sort of comedy of the inhumanly vindictive antagonism by which a man and woman protract the ultimate inevitable plunge into each other's arms has, even at its silliest, some basis in truth. It is by no means new 1) to identify this skirmishing of the sexes with class warfare, 2) to resolve all class distinctions in the clinch. The one thing that gives this thousandth version any novelty is Alan Ladd's triple-chilled proficiency at handling all the tricks of making love in reverse gear. This is as interesting to look at, in a simpleminded way, as someone drinking a glass of beer standing on his head. But it probably takes a great deal more talent.

Together Again (Columbia) is a title which presumably refers to the fact that Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer once made a successful romance called Love Affair (1939), and are now at it once more. It can hardly refer to the present picture. Its story is a skittish, moderately ribald frappe about a small-town mayoress (Miss Dunne), her father-in-law (Charles Coburn), and a sculptor (Mr. Boyer) who remodels her career.

Father-in-Law Coburn is of the opinion that there are better things for a handsome widow to do than fill her dead husband's political and social boots; when his prim housekeeper asks what, he replies, "I'm afraid you wouldn't remember." Mayoress Dunne begins uneasily to suspect that the old man is right when, in Manhattan, she meets the man who is to make the damaged statue of her husband as good as new. Sculptor Boyer follows her home and sets up shop in the garage. Before long Miss Dunne's infatuated stepdaughter is pinning her hair up, whereas Miss Dunne is letting hers down and, in general, acting, as the child describes it, "kinda leapy." But the leapier she gets, under the disturbing influence of Bohemia, the more nervously she yammers about her duty to the community, which does not approve of people like Mr. Boyer. Before the plot uncomplicates itself, the sculptor is engaged to her stepdaughter and she herself has received startling proposals from a high-school boy.

These reasonably funny entanglements with the adolescents would be a lot funnier if the emboldened boy had made love like a movie star--and that in turn would have afforded one of the few scenes in history in which cinematic ootchmagootch* was unquestionably authentic. Mr. Boyer makes an artist's fac,ade and unspoken opinions reasonable on the screen, Miss Dunne ought to be able to make quite a go of politics. Mr. Coburn, as always, must be described as "dependable." Too often that adjective compares unfavorably with a blunt instrument. In his case, however, it covers a multitude of talents.

V-l, The Robot Bomb (British Ministry of Information; RKO-Radio).

This official robomb short includes some astutely quiet shots: of placid wheat, a blowing summer tree in the wasted city, children picking their way, with touching shyness, among freshly ruined homes. It also has some intensely exciting shots of the bombs in flight, fantastic as Buck Rogers and intimately sinister as a noise in the wall, a weirdly terrible expression and symbol of the enemy. And there is one tremendous moment when, in one of the most sensational scenes of the war, a V-1 is caught on the wing by a British plane, roars the screen full of its disappointed death.

* The word, which has variant spellings, is Hollywood onomatopoeia for lovemaking in the "Latin" manner.

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