The New Pictures

Life with Father (Warner) has been treated by Hollywood with the care and respect that is due the biggest hit in the history of the stage. Warner Bros, bought the play for $500,000 down plus a sizable percentage of the gross receipts. In the filming, Father was a major effort in Technicolor fidelity to an original. Every scene added to the cinema version was developed from the original sketches of Clarence Day, and the picture was made under the supervision of Playwright Howard Lindsay and of Mr. Day's widow.

The mountain went through an awful lot of labor, considering the results. But Father is still pleasant, solid entertainment.

As most people know by now, Father (William Powell) is the archetype of the absolute family monarch of the '80s -- a man .disinclined to take any lip even from the Almighty Himself. But there is an innocence about his tyranny which excuses the kind way everybody, including the authors, feels toward him. Mother (Irene Dunne) is a gentle and infinitely guileful soul with great skill at winning victories by passive resistance. There are four sons, each in a different shade of red hair.

William Powell, with the help of a fiery wig, looks right as Father and Irene Dunne seems to understand Mother.

Father was put on film when the play was already an enormous success. It is filmed like a success; it has the glitter, the good humor and the rather beefy adroitness of a success. The chances are a hundred to one that it will be a success.

Black Narcissus (Rank, Universal-International) is the curious story of some Anglican nuns who, in the interests of healing and teaching the Himalayan natives, are sent to establish a new convent in an abandoned mountain harem.

Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is appointed Superior; as it turns out, she is a bit too young and imperious for the job. Sister Briony (Judith Furse) is taken along for her medical knowledge. Sister Honey (Jenny Laird) is a gentle creature, a tonic for jangled nerves. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) is responsible for the garden. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) is a jagged-voiced, quarrelsome neurotic; it is hoped that the drastic change of surroundings will do her good.

But the change brings no good for any of the Sisters. They are disturbed by the remoteness of the place and its unearthly quiet, by the winds, by the breath-taking beauty of the mountains. They are unsettled by the florid carnality of the murals which glow from the walls of the old pleasure house. And people trouble them as much as the place and its erotic past.

A lush young native girl (Jean Simmons) and a splendidly dressed young nobleman (Sabu) come to the convent to learn the ways of God and of Western civilization, but stay to play peekaboo. The local nabob's insolent British handyman (David Farrar) lolls about the nunnery in shorts, displaying enough chest hair to stuff a kneeling cushion.

Gradually the less stolid of the nuns start coming apart. Sister Philippa plants flowers instead of the vegetables that they need. Sister Superior Clodagh's prayers are interrupted by flashbacks to a love affair. Sister Ruth does not renew her vows (which are renewable annually in this Order); she pours herself into a red dress and makes a maddened dead-set for the Englishman. The pagan atmosphere is too much for the nuns; by the time the rains set in, they forlornly abandon St. Faith's for the convent back in Calcutta.

The attempt to convey the idea that nuns are human beings is doubtless laudable and sincerely undertaken. But considering the fact that Writer-Directors

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made the excellent Colonel Blimp, it is surprising how little they get across, here, about human beings. The talk about the strange, compelling atmosphere of the place--a Lost Horizon routine in reverse --is just talk; lovely as some of the Technicolor photographs are, they bring little of the strangeness to the audience's eyes. Although some of the characters change, they change by sudden leaps & bounds, and without sufficient motivation.

Messrs. Powell & Pressburger have made the most of some melodramatic scenes and have hooked together many close-ups of uncommon sensitiveness and force. But in spite of a considerable lavishing of talent and good intention, Black Narcissus remains a striking sample of bad art, combining the least attractive features of slick and long-haired fiction.

The Roosevelt Story (Tola), culled from 2,000,000 feet of documentary film, is a kind of cinematic Ode on the Death of a Hero. Its story is told through the voices and memories of mourners who watched Franklin Roosevelt's funeral cortege in Washington. Mainly the screen is occupied by mfovie portraits of the late President, from the earliest to the last that were made. Several digressions describe the big depression, the distastrous dust storms of the middle '303, the building of Norris Dam, etc. The most striking digression traces the U.S. campaign in Europe, from the invasion of Normandy to the German surrender, while the President's voice quietly speaks the long prayer he composed for the invasion.

The picture also tells the story of Franklin Roosevelt's life and particularly of his presidency. But the film is of interest chiefly because it assembles in one place so many images of the face, so many recordings of the voice and the way of speaking--a full document of the changes that took place in externals and, by vivid inference, in the mind and spirit of the man. Some of these shots are hardly better than silly; some--notably Roosevelt's hurried, death-haunted address to Congress after his return from Yalta--are extraordinarily moving.

The film would be worth seeing if only for these portraits and the psychological story which they tell; but it is also fascinating as a specimen of modern, secular hagiography. In that respect it can wholly satisfy only those who are unquestioningly convinced of Roosevelt's greatness. The claim that the picture is completely nonpolitical is absurd. It is not only intensely political, but biased and sentimental; e.g., there is no recognition of such failures in international diplomacy as the Yalta conference. The comments of the plain people who remember and tell the Roosevelt story are mawkish examples of common-mannishness. The only dissenting voice is from a malevolent caricature of the club-chair Roosevelt-hater.

The net impression of the film is that Roosevelt personally invented the idea that ordinary people have a few ordinary rights, and that he alone, among the U.S. political figures of his time, had a heart and a soul. Most unfortunately, the emotional focus of the picture is a kind of leader-worship, hardly more attractive in the fact that the leader happened to be a man of good will rather than of ill.

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