The New Pictures

Day of Wrath (Carl Dreyer; Schaefer Associates) is a study of the struggle between good & evil, as waged among witches, priests and ordinary people of a 17th Century Danish town. It opens with the quietly horrifying interrogation, torture and burning alive of an old woman who has been denounced as a witch. The rest of this Danish-made picture examines, no less acutely, three souls in torment.

The aging pastor (Thirkild Roose) is suffering because he won his young wife by deceit; he supervises the destruction of the old woman who might have betrayed him. The pastor's son (Preben Lerdorff) is suffering because he has fallen in love with his young stepmother. His sense of honor is strong enough to poison his love, but not as strong as the love itself. The young wife (Lisbeth Movin) is in the worst predicament of the three; though she suffers agonies of desire, neither conscience nor pity can touch her. The others are merely damaged; she is a lost soul, dying before the spectators' eyes.

This is a film that explores moral complexities. The wife is brought to her deepest ruthlessness not only by her own genuine love and her own innate weakness, but also by beginning to learn the worst about her husband, by perceiving that she may lose her lover through the best that is in him, and crucially, by her husband's most earnest efforts to face his own evil, and to be good to her. Moreover, the young lovers' sin of youthfulness is perceived with complete compassion, even by the husband.

Stories such as this, which Hawthorne might have written, are seldom written (or read) in our time; they are even more seldom brought to the screen. Producer-Director Carl Dreyer (who made the famed Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) has filmed Day of Wrath with more than sufficient sobriety, restraint, insight and beauty.

The film has earned great acclaim in Europe. Those who prefer their movies with a nervous tempo and honeyed brightness will find it very slow and very dark. But Dreyer has used timing and lighting so artfully that his characters seldom have to speak and never waste a word; he has gone farther than most moviemakers towards solving the difficult problems of silent cinema in a talk-ridden era. Some of his close-ups are extraordinarily long, but they are brimming with substance: the subtle, beautifully acted modulations of deep moral anguish.

Day of Wrath is, to be sure, the kind of classical work in which scrupulous care is taken never to exploit a sensation or an emotion. Thus, beautiful as it is, it leaves one relatively cold. Dreyer seems to be more interested in creating motion portraits than drama, but he makes grave and noble drama of his portraits.

The Brothers (Rank; Prestige) is one of those "stark" dramas about people very close to nature, in which strong men snarl at each other over a morsel of feminine flotsam (Patricia Roc), primitive passions are stripped to their G-strings, simple folk lap up their liquor as avidly as so many intellectuals, and the dialect is as hard to get through as a barbed-wire entanglement.

Like most such pseudo-bucolic rubbish about simple folk, this one has only the very transient virtue of being in fashion. It was a mistake to waste, on such a story, the brusque, noble backgrounds (the Scottish island of Skye) and the honest abilities of Director David MacDonald, who had the controlling hand in making Desert Victory, one of the first really excellent war documentaries.

The Woman In White (Warner), Wilkie Collins' mid-Victorian melodrama, has enough plot for a dozen ordinary movies--and a lot too much for one, unless that one is done brilliantly. This production is sound, rather than brilliant. Chunk by chunk it is patiently, intricately wrought and highly polished; but the chunks have to be shoved around like so many massive pieces of Victorian furniture. Those who made the film have taken a pretty good, but no longer very believable book a great deal too seriously. Treated with less respect, it might have been turned into a lively, believable movie.

There are appropriate performances by Sydney Greenstreet as a mesmerist, blackmailer and general mastermind; Agnes Moorehead as his ruined wife; John Abbott as her twitchy brother; John Emery as an assistant scoundrel; and decorative performances by Alexis Smith as the heroine and Eleanor Parker (the woman of the title) in a double role. It is almost impossible to be frightened by the picture, but everybody involved seems to "savor" the period, as if it were fine old brandy. The brandy isn't as good as all that, but the savor is pleasant in an old-fashioned sort of way.

River Lady (Universal-International) is a solid little "sleeper" in a solid set of Technicolor pajamas. The studio seems to have intended making just another Yvonne de Carlo picture. But Scripters D. D. Beauchamp and William Bowers somehow got inspired by a logging war and turned out a trim screenplay; they even went so far as to write some good dialogue. Rough-hewn Rod Cameron turns in a smooth-sawn performance as a lumberjack, and Newcomer Helena Carter is expert as the girl who takes Rod away from his fancy lady (Miss De Carlo). Also starred is a redwood tree that saves plenty of money--and other redwood trees --by taking the same beautiful fall almost every time the camera looks around.

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