The New Pictures

The Fugitive (Argosy; RKO Radio) is based on Graham Greene's novel, The Labyrinthine Ways (TIME, April 8, 1940), set in Mexico during the revolution's purges of the Roman Catholic Church in the '20s and early '30s.

The central figure of the book is a priest in mortal sin. While the hounds of the law bay after the "whiskey priest" from village to village, the Hound of Heaven tracks him down the labyrinthine ways of his own mind. Guilt wrings him like dysentery, leaving nothing but a yearning to do God's will--if only he were priest enough. When death finally comes for him, grinding hardship and nibbling remorse have left very little to take.

The film cravenly abandons the rich soil of this moral outpost for a safe, exhausted plot within the reservation. The movie priest (played with cloying unction by Henry Fonda) is a figure who seems to have stepped from a stained-glass window. The God-thirsty peons--who in the book reluctantly receive the brackish priest for the faint flavor of God left in him--receive the movie priest as if he were indeed the Redeemer. And the bloodthirsty police --who in the book had a naive but defensible ethic of their own--are pictured as bestial heavies.

The Fugitive, packed with sun-scorched landscapes and the fine-boned face of Dolores Del Rio, is photographed with supernal beauty. Frame after glorious frame stuns the eye, more as in a gallery than in a motion picture. The static appeal has been aggravated by hesitant cutting and by the burro pace of Dudley Nichols' scenario. To make The Fugitive, famed Director John Ford (The Informer, The Long Voyage Home) slipped the golden shackle of Hollywood, took a skeleton crew to Mexico and filled out his staff and cast from the Mexican movie industry. The trip was obviously intended to produce a work of art. It produced only a work of artiness.

It Had to Be You (Columbia) can only be explained as an attempt to construct a plot from snatches of old Tin Pan Alley lyrics.

Did you ever see a dream walking? Well, Ginger Rogers did. Cornel Wilde, all dressed up like the answer to an Indian love call, is literally the man of her dreams. It seems that she met his living image at a masquerade when they were a couple of kids, but that was long ago and far away. One morning, waking out of a mist of dreams, Ginger sees Cornel's face before her.

Why, you came out of a dream! she exclaims. It's a sin to tell a lie, Cornel concedes, and adds that he won't go back to his cabin in the sky until Ginger finds and weds his living image. Realizing that you can't hold a memory in your arms, Ginger follows her secret heart (who has grown up to be a fireman) until smoke gets in his eyes and he says, I surrender, dear. Cash customers have got a right to sing the blues.

The Red Stallion (Eagle-Lion) is about as good as Hollywood generally does for children under 16. The title derives from a large, red-haired horse that has what appears to be delicate baby-blue eyes veiled with beautiful false eyelashes. After long training by a small, red-haired boy (Ted Donaldson) and interminable praying by a pious terrier, Big Red wins the big race just in time to save the old homestead from the sheriff. Best bit: a gory battle royal between the stallion and a jolly black bear, which delegates all the infighting to a stand-in from the taxidermist.

Children over 16 may have objections to the sickly yellow cast of the Cinecolor and to the reappearance of that almost extinct species, the shuffling yaassuh-bawss Negro comic.

So Well Remembered (Rank; RKO Radio). Once upon a time, in a beastly old castle, lived a beastly old man and his Beautiful Daughter (Martha Scott). They were wicked, of course, because they were rich. Down in the village lived a Promising Young Man (John Mills) who was good, because he was poor.

When the old man ran out of money, the Beautiful Daughter married the Promising Young Man. But all she wanted was Success, while he sought Virtue. So she heartlessly cast him aside and married a rich merchant in another city. Some 20 years later, when she came back to live in the beastly old castle, Virtue triumphed--by thwarting the Beautiful Daughter (now a beastly old woman) in her design to wreck her own son's happiness.

This kiddie-car plot will not dismay admirers of Novelist James Hilton, who have learned that his vehicles are always freighted with something worth unloading. In Goodbye, Mr. Chips it was Tender Sentiment; in Lost Horizon it was Thrilling Adventure; in this picture it is Gripping Realism. The story, which takes place in a British mill town between wars, sets forth in sweeping Hiltonian periods the author's social beliefs; he is squarely back of good government and sanitation, strongly opposed to alcoholism.

As the first picture to be made jointly in England by RKO and J. Arthur Rank (a scheme which enables RKO to use up its frozen assets in Britain and gives Rank the benefit of popular U.S. stars) So Well Remembered is not a promising start. Except for the well-keyed playing of John Mills (Great Expectations), nothing about the film is likely to be so well remembered.

To Live in Peace (Lux-Pao; Times Film). The little village seemed to have been mislaid among the hills by careless History until the war of 1944 A.D. To Live in Peace records, in a high-keyed eclogue, one villager's confrontation of History.

The first reels describe the sweet upland bedlam of hens and houseflies, pigs and children in which Uncle Tigna (superbly acted by Aldo Fabrizi, the priest in Open City) lives. He indulges his nagging wife as if she were a pet horsefly, sneaks supper to the children when they are being punished, stains his legs up to the knee treading his grapes, fusses more than the cow over a new calf.

There is a war, they say, down in the valley, but up here there is only one German soldier and one Fascist political secretary. Ma cos'e questa guerra? Tigna wonders--until he finds two U.S. soldiers, escaped war prisoners, in his barn. The Americans stay in Tigna's attic until the Negro G.I. (intelligently played by Johnny Kitzmiller, an ex-captain in the U.S. Army engineers) is well enough to travel. When the lone German unexpectedly pays Tigna a call, the Negro is hustled into the wine cellar and proceeds to get crazy drunk.

The events that follow, in an epileptic thrashing between comedy and tragic irony, come pretty close to the Dostoevskian mood. After a wild spree, the Negro and the Nazi, both blind with drink and international good will, jitterbug out into the night to tell the world amid ecstatic gun bursts that the war is over. The town goes crazy. By the time Tigna can restore sanity, the German is sleeping it off in the street.

Next morning, for a long moment, the whole village holds its breath as the German stumbles to his feet. Will he remember the Negro--and what will he do about it?

Rarely has any film trod so surely the treacherous path between a laugh and a shriek. Like Open City (TIME, March 4, 1946) and Shoeshine (TIME, Sept. 8), To Live in Peace has been trampled into a sort of rude excellence under the rude weight of Italy's long burdens. U.S. moviegoers will not see many more such films from Italy. Italian moviemakers have decided to turn to subjects with more popular appeal; it does not pay, apparently, to be too good.

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