The New Pictures
Counter-Attack (Columbia) has its off moments, but they do not keep it from being an absorbing and notable picture. Its story: a Russian paratrooper (Paul Muni) and a Partisan girl (Marguerite Chapman), seeking vital data about the location of enemy troops, are trapped with eight German soldiers in the basement of a shelled factory. The two Russians are armed, and they have lantern light and candles enough to last perhaps a week. An initialed German revolver leads them to suspect that an officer, who would have the information they seek, is hiding in disguise among their prisoners. Using their peasant shrewdness and stubborn ness against German craft and arrogance, and conducting an increasingly terrible battle against sleep, they set to work to worm the officer out of the group and the information out of the officer.
In the course of the contest the paratrooper's savage cockiness causes him to blurt out a crucial Russian secret -- that the counterattacking Russians will cross a river at an "impossible" point by means of a night-built, underwater bridge. (Of the building and the crossing there are some operatically magnificent shots.) In the long run, however, stubborn shrewd ness triumphs over crafty arrogance.
At several crucial points this essentially psychological melodrama becomes dubious through overtheatricality, but overall it is searching and persuasive well beyond the usual attempt of films. The picture is also a very considerable cinematic tour de force, comparable with Hitchcock's Life boat and in some ways even harder to do.
Plenty of good directors have wanted to bring off just this sort of dead-static drama, so daringly ascetic in its denial of all the screen is supposed to need most and do best. Few have tried it, and none has succeeded more shrewdly than Zoltan Korda. With last year's excellent Sahara, this film puts him among the country's top directors.
He owes a debt, however, to James Wong Howe's beautiful photography, to Scriptwriter John Howard Lawson (who also wrote Sahara), and to the eight Germans who, barring some excesses forced on them by the script, make up a supporting cast the like of which is dreamed of but seldom seen. In his fatter, more difficult role Paul Muni is as fine as they are so long as he takes it easy, but when he gets busy as an actor, his sincere, carefully paragraphed work seems unreal beside the Germans' snapshot authenticity.
The Corn Is Green (Warner) a very honest adaptation of Emlyn Williams' stage hit about the intrepid spinster who brought literacy to a Welsh coal town, has all sorts of well-intended ingredients, but as drama and as entertainment they come out lumpily, like somewhat heavy dumplings. There are several reasons. Besides the best one--that it wasn't really a very good play to begin with--the others are honorable minor defeats in an uphill battle. But they help explain why the movie, though it may well have a good run too, is less impressive than the play.
Bette Davis is in one way more to be respected than Ethel Barrymore, who originally created the role of the teacher. The role is not a glamorous one, and straightforward, careful Bette Davis gives it no bewilderment of glamor whatsoever.
Yet this is more of a loss than a gain ; for Miss Barrymore's incorrigible abilities as an enchantress, however inappropriate to the role, were practically all that made the play shine. Moreover, Miss Davis is not old enough, as Miss Barrymore was, to keep every hint of boy-meets-girl out of the teacher's moving relationship with the uncouth young miner who is her star pupil. Newcomer John Dall, as the miner, cares a lot for his role, but he is too urban and smooth to convey much power through it, once he gets the coal dust off his face. Another newcomer, Joan Lorring, as a hysterical little cockney slut who gets herself and the young man in trouble, mixes talent and overemphasis in about equal parts. Hit of the show: Rosalind Ivan, having herself a high old time as the cockney tart's earthy, evangelistic mother.
The Unseen (Paramount) has the makings of a good scare picture: an in quisitive governess (Gail Russell); a suspiciously unpleasant widower (Joel McCrea); a medical neighbor with a voice like sloe gin (Herbert Marshall); a brutal and mysterious murder; two edgy chil dren (Nona Griffith and Richard Lyon) in sadistic league about some grim secret; a sour-eyed furnace-fixer (Mikhail Rasumny) ; and a rumor of wandering lights in the boarded-up mansion next door.
The picture has provocative trimmings, too: the locked front door which oddly keeps opening in the dead of night; the newspaper clipping about the murder in the little girl's scrapbook; the little boy's curious addiction to a raucous recording of There'll Be Some Changes Made; his disquietingly systematic habit of hanging a toy elephant in his nursery window and lying awake watching it; his inexplicably intense hatred of his new governess. As sophisticated Producer John Houseman and his players knock these and other ingredients against each other, they give off an occasional resonance that makes your flesh creep for the nearest mental foxhole.
But that doesn't happen nearly often enough. Besides a general, jerky tortuousness of plot and hint and good red herring, separate scenes are overtrained to a point at which, matched together, they are too stale for the race. The picture lacks, overall, a sense of what to emphasize and what to relax about -- notably in its failure to make you constantly feel, or see enough of, the cavernous menace of the empty, busy house next door. There are, however, some flashes of really frightening evil in young Richard Lyon, and Gail Russell has a gift for conveying the shyly spirited, awkwardly exciting qualities proper to a beautiful governess who doesn't quite know her place.
The Valley of Decision (MGM), Marcia Davenport's highly colored best seller about steel and several generations of steelmen and their women and chil dren, would have been no easy job to adapt for the screen, at best. In choosing too often the better part of valor, MGM has permitted too little of the imaginable best to survive. It was probably discreet to reduce Mrs. Davenport's 790-page chronicle to a few years and a few major episodes, but they move with little essential vitality, at a wedding-march pace.
The film tells of an Irish girl of the 1870's (Greer Garson) who becomes a servant in the home of a mill owner (Donald Crisp) whom her legless, ex-millhand father (Lionel Barrymore) hates. She watches over the mill owner's stuffy, weak or shallow children (Dan Duryea, Marshall Thompson and Marsha Hunt respectively), becomes a bosom friend of his wife (Gladys Cooper), and falls in love with his one worthy son (Gregory Peck). After trying to help settle a labor dispute involving Montague Barrymore and Capulet Crisp, she withdraws to watch her lover endure a loveless marriage (Jessica Tandy). The movie, as usual, provides a happier ending than the book allowed. In spite of dead stretches and hammy streaks, it isn't a bad story; but it is hardly worth two hours' expensively handsome, meticulous telling.
Though he is hampered by more stolid and much more pretentious material, Director Tay Garnett is still clearly the man who gave the melodramas Bataan and The Cross of Lorraine their honest intensity, and Cameraman Joseph Ruttenberg and several players--notably the Misses Cooper, Tandy and Hunt and Messrs. Peck and Crisp--add valuable services of their own. The main reason the picture will do well, though, is that it gives Greer Garson a chance at something new.
Her work is not all satisfactory. On the one hand Miss Garson sometimes depends too heavily on the limited charms of a brogue, a bustle and a charade-like servant's toddle; on the other, as if by weary obligation, she sometimes lets her face become MGM's official Etruscan mask. Between these hazards, however, she walks a wide and pleasant road, with evident delight and considerable power to communicate it. Some of her love scenes, especially, are worthy of a much better film.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.