The New Pictures

Till the End of Time (RKO Radio) is a sweetened-up psychiatric case history of four war-battered young people. A glossy piece of entertainment, the picture neglects to answer all the urgent questions it poses.

To an introspective young war widow and three jittery ex-marines, the humdrum postwar world looks pretty hopeless. Dorothy McGuire cannot put aside the dead romantic daydreams that crashed over Europe with her flyer husband. Ex-Pugilist Bill Williams bitterly resents his new artificial legs. Robert Mitchum takes to drink, hoping to forget the painful silver plate in his head. Guy Madison, home from the Pacific with a whole skin, is too restless to stomach the unexciting routine of a civilian job.

Up to a point, the emotional maladjustments of this unhappy quartet are pictured with realism and honesty. But an honest solution to all their complex problems would certainly have endangered the film's entertainment possibilities. Producer Dore Schary took no such risk. After a bang-up barroom brawl and an exchange of neat, safe platitudes, everything at the fade-out is suddenly just dandy for everybody.

Most remarkable feature of Till the End of Time: the difficult neuroses-threatened male lead, which might well have frightened a veteran actor, was thrust on a blond, dark-browed, sensationally handsome young man whose entire previous acting experience consisted of one movie bit part. Guy Madison, 24, ex-telephone lineman, was allowed a seven-day leave from the Navy in 1944 to speak a few lines in a David O. Selznick production. The volume of ecstatic bobby-sox fan mail (some 62,000 letters, many addressed simply to The Cute Sailor in Since You Went Away) was staggering.

Ever conscious of acting skill, Hollywood executives are even more sensitive to what the public wants. Female moviegoers in sizable numbers plainly wanted Guy Madison. For his second film appearance, nothing short of full stardom was thinkable.

Easy to Wed (MGM) is polished and mounted with all the technical wizardry and great expense that M-G-M lavishes on its most precious jewels. The fact that this film is basically a blob of paste will not keep it from making its rich manufacturers considerably richer. The unbeatable ingredients: lively music, Technicolor, fine feathers, romance, colossal production numbers, slapstick, four big, sure-fire stars.

Pink-haired Van Johnson, cashing in on his early experience as a Broadway chorus boy, amazes his public by singing and dancing. As romantic lead comedian, Van also makes love and makes like a wild duck. Esther Williams shows off her dramatic talents in elaborate gowns and her more notable gifts in a plain bathing suit. Competing for laughs, Keenan Wynn and Lucille Ball work so hard they seem bent on destroying themselves.

Adapted from a 1936 movie called Libeled Lady (starring Jean Harlow), the complicated plot of Easy to Wed is oddly obtrusive for a musical. Van Johnson, whose millions of avid fans were first won by his freckle-nosed, boyish charm, is woefully miscast as a professional wolf who makes a living by compromising ladies. Only Comedienne Lucille Ball, a brash, bubbling extravert who is frequently used to bolster up badly contrived Hollywood farces, remains unfazed and funny through it all.

Assuming that the neighborhood theater is comfortably air conditioned, Easy to Wed is a simpleminded, perfectly harmless way to kill a couple of sticky summer hours.

Of Human Bondage (Warner) is a handsome, efficient, totally unnecessary film remake of Somerset Maugham's 1915 novel. It contains few surprises for anyone who has ever read the reputedly autobiographical book or seen the well-made 1934 movie with the late Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.

This time Austrian-accented Paul Henreid is the overly sensitive, love-tortured medical student. (Henreid's blatantly un-British enunciation is lightly dismissed by a reference in the script to his "Viennese mother.") Eleanor Parker, a pretty, plumpish, 24-year-old ingenue, is physically miscast as the scrawny little slut of a waitress. But under Director Edmund Goulding's shrewd guidance, she does a fine, shoulder-wriggling job in the repellent role that gave Bette Davis a start as the screen's No. 1 hussy.

The picture's chief novelty: cool, blonde Alexis Smith, try as she will, fails to inspire the hero to Better Things. With her ladylike beauty, Alexis has made quite a Hollywood careeer of inspiring heroes, especially composers (the film George Gershwin and the film Cole Porter, both under Alexis' magic spell, sat right down and dashed off their best music). But she doesn't quite click with the screen's young Maugham. The poor boob goes right on yearning for that impossible, vulgar hashslinger.

Dead of Night (Ealing-Universal) is an unusual, British-made thriller which Universal is hawking in the U.S. with an unusual ad campaign. "The everyday phrases and superlatives of ballyhoo," say Universal's ballyhoo experts, "are completely inadequate to capture the mood, the depth, the excitement of this oddly stirring motion picture."

Dead of Night isn't quite that good--but it is smoothly acted, cleverly directed, well off the beaten Hollywood path. It offers the same sort of spine-cooling thrill you get from listening to a group of accomplished liars swapping ghost stories.

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