New Picture

Daisy Kenyan (20th Century-Fox) will probably strike soap-opera fans as a pretty intriguing and knotty Problem Drama. Will Daisy (Joan Crawford), a well-heeled but struggling commercial artist, pry dashing Dana Andrews loose from his rich, neurotic wife (Ruth Warrick)? Or do Dana's little daughters mean too much to him? Or will Joan marry Henry Fonda, a widower and ex-soldier so little in touch with this world that he even forgets to keep a date with her?

And if she does marry Henry (she eventually does), will she ever manage really to forget Dana's extramarital embraces? And will Henry ever be free of his dead wife, and of the reverberations of the war? And if Dana's wife at last gets around to divorcing him, and he comes after Joan, which man will she choose? Or will she choose either? To Dana, and to most of the audience, all this looks easy. But you never can tell about women.

Indeed you can't. They may fool everybody by seeing that this movie is a preposterously shallow mishandling of some perfectly real problems. It is also a characteristic Hollywood job of turning worthwhile material into trash and presenting it so stylishly that at times it looks good. The dialogue, an affected, pseudo-sophisticated patter, is spoken with such expert variety of inflection that it sounds real, and even intelligent.

The principal roles are obviously cut out of slick paper. But Joan Crawford knows as well as any movie star how to make such a manhandled heroine into a magic mirror for women moviegoers. Henry Fonda is a shrewd comedian, in spite of having to play that eternal Lost Little Boy who unleashes skittish maternal emotions. Dana Andrews, a most talented actor, has to call someone "honeybunch" umpteen times in this show, yet he never fails to make it a more or less fresh revelation of character. Director Otto Preminger is expert at the glossy details that are useful to this sort of story.

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