The New Pictures

Love Letters (Hal Wallis-Paramount) endows an incredibly tortuous plot with such remarkably good acting, photography and direction that, whether you can take it or not, you are practically forced to like it.

The plot machinery starts whirring when Alan Quinton (Joseph Gotten) writes love letters for a casually wolfish friend, and falls in love with the recipient (Jennifer Jones). After that, all hell breaks loose. The girl, in love with the letters, marries the man she thinks has written them; the husband is murdered. The girl, suspected of the murder, comes down with acute amnesia. Alan realizes that his own deceit has brought on the murder and the woe, and that if the girl recovers her memory, she will probably lose her mind. Despite all these causes for alarm, he marries her. Sure enough, she recovers her memory--just as an especially fancy piece of plot mechanics resolves everybody's troubles.

Played as straight romance, this complicated fantasy is so elegantly presented that it becomes not only exciting but almost believable. Director William Dieterle wrings the last dramatic drop out of scene after scene. Photographer Lee Garmes, aided by some new painted canvas reflectors of his own devising, turns out a mellow masterpiece of lights and textures.

Moreover, the picture is a Thespian witches' Sabbath. Except when she overuses her eyes in fey moments, Jennifer Jones more than delivers on the promise of her Song of Bernadette. Restrained Joseph Gotten gives the film its needed ballast of sanity. Hilt-deep supporting performances are contributed by Gladys Cooper, Cecil Kellaway, and a brilliant Australian named Ann Richards. She has three-alarm beauty and four-alarm talent, and is the only screen actress since Ingrid Bergman to look wonderful in a shirtwaist.

Our Vines Have Tender Grapes

(M.G.M.) is a leisurely, kindly story of life among Scandinavian-blooded Wisconsin farmers. Farmer Jacobson (Edward G. Robinson) has set his heart on building a finer barn than he can afford, but the needs of his own family and the burning of the barn of a prosperous neighbor (Morris Carnovsky) give him bigger and better ideas. His somewhat selfish daughter (Margaret O'Brien) loves a calf named Elizabeth, but her neighbor's misfortune inspires her to give up Elizabeth--an act which dissolves the whole countryside in similar generosity. One glowing convert is a city-bred schoolteacher (Frances Gifford), who not only learns to love the rural life that first appalled her with its narrowness but even comes to accept the rather expansive view that one must be tolerant toward intolerance.

Our Vines is still another chapter in what seems to be a cinematic back-to-the-grass-roots trend (The Southerner, State Fair). It adds weight to the truism that eloquence about the land and its stewards increases in direct proportion to its removal from studio sets. Yet there are many moving scenes and fine performances in this film.

Edward G. Robinson, one of the best as well as one of the most overtyped actors in Hollywood, celebrates his hour of liberty with admirable gentleness and restraint. Chin-whiskered Morris Carnovsky gives his rural prosperity and disaster something of Old Testament nobility and poignance. Margaret O'Brien's acting talents more than overcome the plain fact that she is no country girl. And Agnes Moorehead, as a sensitive, inhibited mother, creates a rarity in cinema--a character too believably complex to wear either of the standard sandwich-boards: 1) I AM LOVABLE, Or 2) I AM A LOUSE.

As it must to all but the most exceptional movies, melodrama comes to Our Vines --in fire and death and near-drowning. It is effective melodrama, but the film is at its best in quieter moments--as when little Miss O'Brien watches a circus come in before dawn and ecstatically thanks the elephant which has lifted her in his trunk; or when Miss Moorehead pretends excitement as she unwraps a Christmas present; or when the screen is drenched with the peaceful boredom of a rainy day in the country.

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