The New Pictures

The Suspect (Universal) is the morally reprehensible tale of a pudgy little husband who 1) begs a divorce from his unendurable wife, 2) failing to get it, murders her, 3) marries and lives happily with the girl he loves. What is more, the man is presented so sympathetically that when at last, thanks to the guile of a police inspector and his own tortured conscience, he complies with the codes of society and cinema and returns to face the music, the average cinemaddict will feel very sorry indeed.

The film gets away with this startling argument against the sanctity of unhappy marriage by playing the whole business as period melodrama (London, 1902). And very good melodrama it is. Ella Raines, Stanley Ridges and Henry Daniell are excellent respectively as Wife No. 2, the calmly cruel sleuth, and a neighbor who blackmails his way to death. Rosalind Ivan is satisfactorily terrifying as the Gorgon-like Wife No. 1. Sloping, suffer ing Charles Laughton has a high old histrionic time and gives the audience one --in one of his best roles since he played a similar mousy murderer in Payment Deferred (1932).

The picture is directed to the last gasp and shudder by Robert Siodmak (Christmas Holiday, Phantom Lady), who was born in Memphis, Tenn. but developed his talent for terror in the great studios of pre-Hitler Germany. Notably frightening scene: suspicious Inspector Ridges re-enacting the probable method of murder for the appalled widower while the camera, taking possession of Laughton's brain, flicks from bit to bit of the scene of the crime, turning a dark wardrobe, a torn stair-carpet, into so many kicks in the emotional midriff.

Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (20th Century-Fox) is a sincere but misguided attempt at an unusual, simple, beautiful movie. The basic idea is good: to let a family play host for a day to a soldier, previously unknown to them, and to let nature take its course. Such a story might be told in as many different ways as there are families, and soldiers. There is certainly no reason why the family should not be a poor one, so that the Sunday Dinner involves sacrifice and anticipation; or why there should not be a marriageable girl (Anne Baxter) on hand; or why she and the soldier (John Hodiak) should not fall in love, even within a day, and make a happy ending of it. But there is every reason why all these people should be real and human, and why the things they do should be unaffected and uncontrived.

The writers of the screen play and the director obviously know a lot less about people than about the formulas of slick fiction. To believe in their characters, or to be moved by anything they do, you will have to be the kind of person who is charmed by hearing an improvident old grandpa (Charles Winninger) addressed innumerable times as "Grandfeathers"; or who can be convinced that a little boy, not trying to be smart-alecky, would say of a flower, "It stinks swell"; or who can be touched by the heavy-handed comedy and pathos lavished on a pet hen named Miss Easter. Sunday Dinner may become a sentimental hit, but as an attempt to tell a moving story about real people, it is embarrassing.

The picture has one important good point: it was a fine idea to locate the family exactly in the actual world (the vicinity of Tarpon Springs, Fla.). This could become a valuable movie habit.

The Ministry of Fear (Paramount), as Graham Greene wrote it, was a thriller so lambent with smolderings of conscience and with religio-psychological sidelights that one critic compared it with Dostoevski. In the film version these murky glimmerings are gone, and the thriller's glow is thus considerably dimmed. But it is a tensely directed (by Fritz Lang) and finely photographed show.

Its story: a lonely young Londoner (Ray Milland), at an apparently fatuous parish bazaar, by mischance speaks a password which puts him in possession of a cake. When various people threaten his life and risk theirs in their effort to get the cake away from him, he begins to realize that he somehow has the key to an elaborate and very sinister Nazi spy-plot. When the detective he hires to help him is murdered, he is in no position to call the matter to the attention of the police, because he has only recently been acquitted of the mercy-killing of his wife. Before he has worked his way out of his difficulties, he has discovered that a clairvoyant, an old bookseller, a Cabinet minister, a tailor and, he fears, the girl he loves (Marjorie Reynolds) are involved in an effort to destroy his nation.

A curiously disappointing film, for all its quality, much of The Ministry of Fear is as bright, sharp and cruel as a tray of surgical instruments--memorable especially for numerous props and sets which evoke the frigid metropolitan atmosphere of which Author Greene is an eloquent poet. Its main trouble is the lack of a warmly living body for the instruments to work on. The novel's hero, though over-literary and soaked with self-pity, was a corroded and conscience-torn young man to whom terrible events happened terrifyingly. The movie's hero is a competent, personable actor, rather sorry at worst about his wife's death, and too comfortably able to take care of himself under the grimmest of circumstances.

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