The New Pictures

An Ideal Husband (London Film; 20th Century-Fox) is not one of Oscar Wilde's best plays, but it has enough edge and style to make the run of plays look oafish. Alexander Korda's screen production of it is short of ideal, but it is distinctly something to see and hear.

The story: Mrs. Cheveley (Paulette Goddard), a high-flying blackmailer, puts the bite on the most model husband and statesman in turn-of-the-century England. Unless he publicly endorses a flagrant speculation fraud, she will expose the one piece of youthful crookedness upon which his fortune and his career are founded. Sir Robert Chiltern (Hugh Williams) is all the more gruesomely trapped because he deeply loves his wife (Diana Wynyard), a noble but somewhat priggish woman who, he is sure, would cease to love him if he should fail to match her idealization of him. His close friend Lord Goring (Michael Wilding), a gentle loafer who handles most of Wilde's sharpest lines, does all he can to get him off the spot. These characters, and others, are so brightly and efficiently presented that they become archetypes for their place and period.

The best things about the screen production are the sets (by Vincent Korda), the costumes (by Cecil Beaton), and the exquisitely muted Technicolor. Most of the casting and acting are good too. The weakest things are the uneven reading of the lines, the lethargic pace, and the final visual essence of the picture.

It could have been one of the most lusciously beautiful movies on record. Even as it stands, it is an entertaining eyeful. Unfortunately, the production occasionally becomes too slow, and too nearly a literal-minded play. It would be much more real if it were less realistic. Apparently Producer-Director Korda was afraid to stylize the picture completely and so slowed up the lines for the general audience. These lines were meant for sleight-of-hand delivery; too often the players draw a diagram of how the rabbit got into the hat.

A Woman's Vengeance (Universal-International), an original screenplay by Aldous Huxley, ran into more than the customary flurry of title trouble. Huxley worked the script up out of his short story, The Gioconda Smile. The studio, advising him that this title was "too obtuse," asked him to try again. Huxley cheerfully suggested another he has used successfully: Mortal Coils. After a good deal of considering, U-I rejected that one on the grounds that people might mistake it for Brooklynese for "curls" or "girls" (doubtless a goil named Moitle).

Huxley, beginning to breathe hard, offered the Macbeth tag, Sleep No More. When U-I still wasn't satisfied, he gave up. Then the studio went to work on the problem. How about The Unguarded Heart? Huxley winced. How about Art of Murder? Huxley shuddered. Or Black Velvet? Huxley beat his temples. Well, then: Vengeance? Or Woman of Vengeance? Huxley's wife tried to calm him down. All right, A Woman's Vengeance it is.

By whatever title, it is a good story and a good movie. The important characters: a rather soft, ill-disciplined rich man (Charles Boyer), attractive to women and dishonest in his dealings with them; his invalid, miserable, vindictive wife (Rachel Kempson); a gentle, passionate, spinsterish neighbor (Jessica Tandy), whose affections he inflames and betrays; an 18-year-old girl (Ann Blyth) whom he marries as soon as his wife dies; an extremely intelligent doctor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke).

When the spinster realizes that the man she loves has jilted her for a young and lovely woman, her heart turns. With the help of a man-hating nurse (Mildred Natwick) she frames him for the murder of his wife. The duels of personality, evidently derived from those between the Inspector and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, lack the blaze and terror of Dostoevsky's great dialogues, but they have a fine intensity and poignancy of their own. The picture is also notable for its moral insight: it is not often that a movie examines wrongdoers with such understanding.

Zoltan Korda (The Macomber Affair) steadily refines and enlarges his talents as a director. Among all the fine performances, two stand out: the acting job of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who is never merely "competent"; and the beautiful performance of Jessica Tandy (star of Broadway's A Streetcar Named Desire), who for the first time gets a movie role she can really sink her talents into.

If Winter Comes (MGM) updates A. S. M. Hutchinson's 1921 bestseller, which was one of the greatest tearjerkers of its decade; it is as teary as ever. When a tearjerker handles an honest theme with anything approaching honesty, it can be a good deal better than it is stylish to admit. Even so, there is something fundamentally dishonest about a tearjerker's intention, and it is never good enough.

If Winter Comes sets out to tell how good, generous, brave and honorable people act under hard circumstances, and what they suffer at the hands of the self-seeking and the coldhearted. When Mark Sabre (Walter Pidgeon) finds that he and his former sweetheart (Deborah Kerr) still love each other, both conduct themselves nobly for the sake of their respective wife and husband (Angela Lansbury and Hugh French). When a girl (Janet Leigh) of the town becomes pregnant and is cast out, Sabre takes her into his home in the face of his wife's outraged desertion and the town's assumption that he is the girl's seducer. When she kills herself, and ruin is the easiest prospect he faces, he and his sweetheart destroy the evidence which would exonerate him, rather than break the heart of his most malicious enemy (John Abbott).

There is nothing wrong with this story that isn't wrong with a number of major novels--except the way a good deal of it is told, oversimplified and trimmed with parsley. Sabre's enemies and their motives are too wicked, fancy, and convenient to the plot design to remain quite believable. The obstructive wife and husband are more conveniently unlovable than an honest imitation of life would allow, and they are so tidily removed from the path of true love that the whole business seems as manipulated as a shell game. Because all the bad people are so extraordinarily nasty, the good people look more mawkish than they deserve to. And as is so often the case in sentimental fiction, the teariness goes hand in hand with some excruciating whimsy. (Sample: two housemaids, the Misses Jinks, one tall, one short, are called High & Low.)

This is one of MGM's English Specials, and the studio's British stable (Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Rhys Williams), accomplished actors all, help it out a good deal. Walter Pidgeon is not very happily cast as Sabre, but he succeeds in making a solid character of him. Britain's Deborah Kerr by now seems thoroughly at home in Hollywood, both as a beauty and an actress; but she is wasted in such a role. Angela Lansbury does a good, straight job in her "unpleasant" role. Janet Leigh deserves much better parts.

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