The New Pictures

The Late George Apley (20th Century-Fox), as a J. P. Marquand novel, was a cleverly genteel variant on the water-drip torture. The story told, in deadpan style, of the gradual destructiveness of a whole mode of life. Like the play which was made from the novel, the movie sacrifices the subtleties of gradualism for dramatic frame and focus.

The Apley clan is examined during a few months of 1912-13, when George (Ronald Colman) is badly upset because his son (Richard Ney) is in love with a Worcester girl. Worse still, his daughter (Peggy Cummins) wants to marry a Yale graduate who is telling his students at Harvard that

Emerson, in his day, had been a radical. Mr. Apley is never "late" in the biographical sense; the movie ads explain that he is slow to learn that he must not ruin his children's future for the sake of the past, but learns "better late than never."

With little deadpan humor, the picture is full of obvious but fairly amusing jokes about the insularity of Boston patricians and of obvious, rather anachronistic japes about Freud. Ronald Colman has gentle grace in the title role; Edna Best as his wife and Percy Waram as a brandy-muzzling relative are effective; Paul Harvey is excellent as the Worcester girl's forthright father; and Peggy Cummins (who won and then lost the lead in Forever Amber) is a very pretty though not very Bostonian daughter. The real star of the show is an ex-Quiz Kid named Vanessa Brown who, as the timid cousin Richard Ney doesn't want to marry, suggests an early Janet Gaynor or a younger Ingrid Bergman.

A friendly, quietly amusing, rather slow picture, Apley is not quite what it might have been: a shrewd comedy of character and of the effect upon character of a highly special place and atmosphere. The film sketches rather than explores the character and fails to do what movies can do so well: convey a special mood.

My Favorite Brunette (Paramount) is a well-roasted rib of the fancy talk and fancy incident served up by Raymond Chandler and other whodunit authors of the rough & tough school.

Hero Bob Hope, a baby photographer with delusions of courage, is minding the office one day for a private detective neighbor when a beautiful adventuress named Dorothy Lamour comes in, mistakes him for the detective and engages him to find her kidnapped uncle. From there, the action leads through various typically Chandlerian hangouts--one of those vast country mansions (big enough, as Narrator Hope puts it, to shoot quail in the foyer); a sinister sanitarium; a Washington hotel in which Hope, by now framed for murder, finds life complicated by a convention of private detectives. While Boss Menace Charles Dingle cajoles Hope in a ripe julep accent, Peter Lorre, the busiest Menace, plants knives and clues all over the place, and hulking Sub-Menace Lon Chaney Jr. takes a simple, boobish pleasure in cracking walnuts with his biceps.

Miss Lamour changes clothes, to good effect, at least a dozen times, and croons Beside You to her unwilling protector. Alan Ladd gets into the act briefly--and so does Bing Crosby at the last possible moment. In a fine moment burlesquing death-cell stoicism, Hope, getting ready for San Quentin's lethal chamber, sneers his low opinion of jails that haven't even changed over to electricity.

Pursued (U.S. Pictures; Warner), which combines horse opera with amnesia, has plot to burn, but little of it catches fire.

Its hero (Bob Mitchum) grows up an adopted orphan. He is troubled by ill-remembered flashes of violence witnessed in early childhood, and is also hounded by a man who, for no reason he can understand, wants to kill him. He falls in love with his adoptive sister (Teresa Wright) and in self-defense kills his adoptive brother. Later on he kills a beau of Miss Wright's (durn it all; self-defense again). Understandably, she decides to marry him and to plug him on their wedding night. That same evening, a half-dozen mysterious men decide to tree him, too. Thanks to all this storm & stress, Mr. Mitchum finally remembers everything, and all the mysteries are explained.

Pursued was written by Niven Busch, who also originally wrote Duel in the Sun, for his wife, Teresa Wright. Miss Wright is a charming and talented actress, but she is not at her best in this sort of role-in-the-hay. Apparently everyone involved in this independent production had the laudable hope of making a western with a difference. But there are perhaps too many differences for one picture, and none of them is very interesting.

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