The New Pictures

Wild Harvest (Paramount) revives the once profitable Quirt-Flagg* formula: two high-skilled bums carom around odd corners of the world, working at the same jobs, tomcatting after the same girls, fighting each other, and unable to do without each other. Wild Harvest adds something new to the formula: this time the heroes are migratory workers, involved in the robust job of wheat harvesting with combines. The harvesting job gives the audience something novel and vigorous to look at, and it also gives the players something better to do than talk and make faces at each other. But there is still too much talking and face making.

Alan Ladd, boss of the gang, can take women or leave them alone, and believes in leaving them alone when there is work to do. Robert Preston, the gang's mechanic, can't leave them alone. He causes so much trouble chasing girls, and bootlegging wheat for chasing-funds, that he would be fired if he weren't indispensable to mechanized harvesting.

The worst of the trouble revolves around Dorothy Lamour, who is marooned on a farm but can think of only one good use for hay. She points this good use out to Ladd, who spurns her advances. So she marries Preston in order to keep in touch with her quarry. Finally Ladd and Preston slug it out in a bar and find that they mean much more to each other than the disconcerted Miss Lamour does.

Wild Harvest was directed by Tay Garnett, who has a flair for directing men and melodramas (Bataan, Cross of Lorraine). Whenever his men are hard at work or at their more believable kinds of play, Director Garnett shows what a good movie this might have been. His harvesters' dance is a fine, forlorn scene, and he stages quite a hair-raising wheat fire and a particularly violent chase. But he seems to have realized that nothing could be done with the tense Lamour-Ladd relationship except to treat it as slightly ridiculous.

Singapore (Universal-International) had a well-publicized Manhattan opening at which the first 100 women to get to the box office* were awarded one string of pearls each. The pearls were synthetic. So was the picture.

The worst thing that can be said about Singapore is that it is a no worse than typical assembly-line job. A lot of technical competence, a certain amount of talent and a staggering amount of time and money have been marshaled into a quiet, polished frenzy about nothing whatever. The picture presents a forgivably languid Fred MacMurray as a pearl smuggler. He marries deep-chested Ava Gardner just in time to lose track of her when the Japanese take Singapore. After the war he comes back to look for her and for some pearls he hid in an electric fan. He and his contraband manage a relatively placid reunion, having to contend only with British law and with a crook (Thomas Gomez).

Fred's readjustment with his wife is not so easy. Under the shock of war, she has developed that reliable old case of amnesia. She doesn't know Fred MacMurray from Fred Allen, and has married a rich planter (Roland Culver), who believes in letting sleeping memories lie. Before he can get her back, MacMurray, who hardly seems up to it, has to shoot holes in a couple of heavies; Ava has to get a bang on the head to restore her memory; and Culver has to turn decent and tell her not to worry about him. The British authorities are not in the least concerned about anything except getting Boy & Girl together and out of the country on the earliest possible plane.

The Tawny Pipit (Rank; Prestige) is --to the English--an exceptionally rare species of titlark. When a pair of them nest in an English field, for the second time on record, World War II becomes about as important, at least to England's more avid ornithologists, as a movie organist's spot between features. England's lay bird lovers are almost as deeply stirred; the whole village of Lipsbury Lea is determined that the pipits shall hatch their brood in peace.

Practicing tankmen are persuaded to keep their distance; the Ministry of Agriculture cancels an order to plow the pipits' particular field; village parishioners sing a lady poet's uproarious anthem in praise of the birds. Menace is supplied by practitioners of the queerest racket yet to break into the movies: egg stealing. The local colonel (retired) bumbles out the movie's "message," to the general effect that Englishmen, funny as they appear about it, are lovers of nature and of fair play, and that, in a sense, the tawny pipits are what England is fighting for.

In the hands of Rene Clair, this yarn might have become a wonderful piece of fun. Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders, who collaborated in writing and directing Pipit, are not quite equal to their idea; and Mr. Miles, who is too young to play the colonel, is not quite up to his role. Now & then the picture, probably the most intensely insular movie the British have yet exported to the U.S., becomes too clumsy or too coy; from beginning to end it is as genteel as rectory crumpets. And though none of the classical Village Types is revealed on the level of high comedy, the picture has considerable charm and humor.

Cynthia (MGM) is a timid smalltown girl (Elizabeth Taylor) in distress. Born delicate, she is kept sickly by her own unhappiness, her frustrated, overanxious parents (George Murphy, Mary Astor) and her pompous doctor-uncle (Gene Lockhart), who bullies the whole family. Music (S. Z. Sakall) and Young Love (James Lydon) arouse in Cynthia a desire to live--and to live like other girls.

The story is told in terms of the small disappointments and triumphs of high-school concerts and dances, the large horrors of quarrelsome family dinners. At its best, it is pleasantly reminiscent of the late Booth Tarkington. At its worst, it slops over with such cheap laughs as the writhings of a tuxedoed adolescent with a recalcitrant shirt front. M-G-M is thinking of condemning pretty Elizabeth Taylor to the salt mines--or gold mines--of a Cynthia series, a la Andy Hardy.

* Sergeant Quirt and Captain Flagg, head men in Laurence Stallings' and Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory? (1926), launched a series of movies that continued through the '30s. * 440 turned up to try.

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