The New Pictures

National Velvet (M.G.M.), from the novel by Enid Bagnold, combines some of the most attractive elements of The Song of Bernadette and of Lassie Come Home. It is almost a children's classic.

Throughout her childhood, horses so deeply excited Velvet Brown (Elizabeth Taylor) that merely to look at them was ecstasy. She lost her heart to one at twelve, when she first saw a neighbor's fierce new gelding running majestically through a meadow. Without quite realizing it, she also lost her heart to her companion that memorable day, a hard little tramp of 17 (Mickey Rooney). He stayed on in the village to work in her father's butcher shop.

When the unmanageable gelding went up for raffle, Velvet never for an instant doubted that she would win him; and she did. The same unshakable faith gave her mastery over the horse. When his magnificent powers as a jumper made it clear that he was qualified for England's greatest and most hazardous steeplechase, the Grand National, it was reckless faith again--plus Velvet's mother (Anne Revere), who had had her fling at the same sort of glory as a Channel swimmer--which brought her the entrance fee.

When the young ex-tramp took the money to London, it was her faith in him that cured him of dishonesty in spite of drunkenness and shady companions. Later on it even cured him of cowardice. Faith won its climactic triumph when, shorn and silked as a boy on the greatest day of her life, Velvet rode her beloved horse to victory over England's best.

National Velvet is not merely sure to delight children and the child in most adults; it is also an interesting psychological study of hysterical obsession, conversion mania, preadolescent sexuality. Twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, a beautiful little girl who has hitherto had minor roles in Lassie Come Home, Jane Eyre, etc., is probably the only person in Hollywood who could bring to this curious role its unusual combination of earthiness and ecstasy. Mickey Rooney proves once for all that he can be a sincere, capable actor when the role calls for it. Anne Revere, in a role which unconventionally (for the screen) combines homeliness, quietude, wisdom, and a sharp flash of sportiness, turns in perhaps the best mother ever seen in a moving picture. And six-year-old Jackie Jenkins, with his bottleful of bugs and headful of lies, is as charming as he was in The Human Comedy.

Yet pleasant and sometimes poignantly beautiful as it is, National Velvet fails to make the most of its opportunities. The relationship between the girl and the young-old bum, a singularly innocent, subtle and touching love story, is merely sketched and hinted now & again, chiefly through the girl's radiant face and Rooney's accomplished acting. In the presentation of the race itself, the chance for a sharply realistic study of an inexperienced girl in competition with tough and tricky jockeys is forfeited for the sake of a few minutes of conventional spills and mass galumphing. Had its makers devoted more care and imagination to such significant detail, National Velvet would have been one of the best films in years. As it stands, it is merely one of the gift horses of 1944 which will best reward examination.

Experiment Perilous (RKO-Radio), a not very thrilling thriller, is the story of a demented Austrian aristocrat (Paul Lukas) who meets, marries and sophisticates a once-pastoral Vermont girl (Hedy Lamarr), then proceeds to poison the mind of her child against her and all but destroy her sanity and her life. He is foiled just in time by George Brent, who takes her back to Vermont, where she and her child rapidly recuperate.

It is a little hard to understand why the picture falls so flat, with so fine an actor as Mr. Lukas in it, as well as intelligent writing, direction and production. A partial explanation may be the fact that everyone paid too-loving attention to the film's chief virtues, which are nice to look at but are not the substance of good melodrama. The virtues: 1) some wintry Manhattan street scenes; 2) a memorable setting and costuming of the turn of the century; 3) Hedy Lamarr.

Miss Lamarr, though inclined to stolidity as an actress, is one of the great beauties of her generation. Her admirers will find her especially well worth watching in this film, for she is far more delicate and responsive in her role than usual, and she has never before been made up, gowned, lighted and photographed to such dazzling advantage.

Winged Victory (20th Century-Fox), Moss Hart's crisply flamboyant salute to the Air Forces, comes to the screen substantially unchanged in cast, story and general feeling. Like the original play, it is as immaculately robust as if it had just stepped out of a barracks shower; indeed, it would gain considerably if it did not so often suggest a Boy Scout Jamboree. Like the original, too, it generates among spectators the sort of friendliness normally reserved for amateurs, since all of its male performers are Air Forces men and the profits go to Army charities. But every one of the players was a more or less seasoned professional of stage, screen or radio before he got into the armed services, and acts accordingly. And the movie, like the play, is as noisy, as expertly put together, and as smooth-running as a bomber.

In some respects the film improves on its original. While its heroes are still at home in their small towns, itching to get into the Air Forces, they are earnest, likable, and about as interesting as so many Rover Boys. But once they are caught up in the tremendously intricate and fascinating process of training and testing and rejection and promotion, cinema's superior realism comes into its own. The best parts of Winged Victory are less like drama than like document, except that documentary films are seldom half as well-made or a tenth as enjoyable.

Jammin' the Blues (Warner) is hailed by Walter Winchell as "a new sort of camera teknik." On the Warner lot, too, people have a feeling that the picture may bring short-subjects a new lease on life.

The film was made by LIFE'S famed fast-action photographer, Gjon Mili. Last summer he assembled some of the artists, Negroes all (save Barney Kessel),* who were playing Los Angeles, got them jamming on a Warner sound stage. Result: two numbers (On the Sunny Side of the Street and Jam Session) which, if not the best that hot players can do, are pretty certainly the most honest, down-to-earth popular music yet recorded for the screen.

These numbers are photographed in two extreme yet simple forms of lighting: chiaroscuro, in which the line of a cheek, the wrinkle of a sleeve, the keys of a fingered saxophone, appear as if drawn in white ink on black paper; and its opposite, in which the musicians appear in almost featureless silhouette against a staring, blank white background.

Overall, the picture's "teknik" is new chiefly in the sense that Hollywood seldom attempts the sort of experiments which for 25 years have been commonplace among advanced cinemamateurs. But the picture is easier and more interesting to look at than any other musical short yet made.

*Marlowe Morris (piano), Sidney Catlett and Joe Jones (drums), Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet (tenor sax), Red Callender and John Simmons (bass), Harry Edison (trumpet), Barney Kessel (guitar).

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