The New Pictures

Joan of Arc (Sierra Pictures; RKO Radio) gives Ingrid Bergman the biggest role in her career. She almost fills it. If the rest of the movie were up to Miss Bergman, it could be rated very close to excellent. As it is, it rates A for effort.

The story of Joan of Arc has enchanted film makers as it has poets, artists, musicians, dramatists, historians. The first film Joan of Arc was made in 1900 by French Movie Pioneer George Melies. Pathe made two versions (1909 and 1913). Cecil B. DeMille's crack at the subject (191?) was called Joan the Woman, starring Geraldine Farrar. Perhaps the most exciting version was Carl Dreyer's silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), starring Mile. Falconetti.

This latest version tells the story of Joan from start to finish--from the time she heard her heavenly voices, as a farm girl at Domremy, to her anguished death at the stake. At times the meticulous history lesson dulls the drama. The storming of Orleans is supposedly as historically correct as research could make it, down to the last split skull and link of armor; but on film it adds up to noisy and not altogether convincing movie battle. Once the picture loses sight of the fact that it is Joan's personal story, she becomes a lifeless symbol in a pageant.

Ingrid Bergman gives Joan the unlip-sticked dignity and the spiritual conviction that the story demands. Whenever Hollywood puts a stagy gloss on the scene, reminding the audience that what they are looking at is a very expensive movie set, Bergman's passionate fidelity to her part saves the day. Fine supporting actors play the Dauphin (Jose Ferrer), the Count of Luxembourg (J. Carrol Naish), the Bishop of Beauvais (Francis L. Sullivan) and Joan's bailiff (Shepperd Strudwick).

Walter Wanger, 54, who had the courage to invest in Joan and produce it, has "repeatedly gambled on a-little-ahead-of-the-parade movie ideas.- Joan of Arc cost $4,600,000 to film, another $1,000,000 for Technicolor; it may have to gross as much as $9,000,000. A producer who bets that much on a script without sex is taking an awful chance. But Wanger had faith in an idea; and his faith was shared by his partners (Sierra Pictures is owned 40% by Ingrid Bergman, 30% each by Wanger and Director Victor Fleming). Says Wanger: "Right now people are confused. They need orientation. They want something more reassuring than material things."

June Bride (Warner). Thanks largely to some bright dialogue and an artful performance by Robert Montgomery, this is the best Bette Davis picture in some time. Relaxing from her usual heavy dramatics in a light comedy, Bette is cast as the snobbish, know-it-all editor of a woman's magazine.

Editor Davis assigns four of her staff to do a picture & text feature on an Indiana small-town wedding. It is such a fascinating assignment that she drops everything to go along on the job herself. The writer is her old beau (Robert Montgomery), an unemployed foreign correspondent.

To meet their deadline, the smart alecks from Manhattan have to photograph a winter wedding to look like a June ceremony. To meet the magazine's flossy standards, they must "do over" the bride's folksy family and a dowdy house crammed full of Victorian gewgaws ("a real McKinley stinker"). To get a little interest into the story, Writer Montgomery even does some tampering with the matter of who is to marry whom.

The picture is fairly funny as soon as the city slickers are turned loose on the Indiana household to beat it into a slick-paper image of American home life. But before it gets down to the pertinent business of massaging weight off a middle-aged housewife or teaching her to bake a cheese souffle, June Bride dawdles a little too long and too archly over the pallid romance between Career Girl Davis and Anti-Feminist Montgomery. Even so, this familiar situation is freshened by sharp lines and the skilled ease with which Montgomery tosses them off.

Road House (20th Century-Fox) is an unlikely tale about a village tough guy (Richard Widmark) who hires a luscious crooner (Ida Lupino) for his roadside joint. He makes a few unsuccessful passes at her, and then goes on a hunting trip, leaving his entertainer to be entertained by his house manager (Cornel Wilde). When his hirelings fall in love, Widmark goes into a mad scene. The scene can only be explained by the fact the scripters knew that Actor Widmark's specialty is playing a demented killer.

All in all, the picture whips up a lot of unmotivated excitement. But Director Jean Negulesco has masked a thin yarn in some deceptive trappings of reality. He swings his camera over short, sharp chunks of dialogue, searches with his lens in the drab corners of the road house, and builds to a climax in a fine movie chase. Lacking lifelike characters, he gives things a gloss of credibility by keeping his camera on the move. Before the audience can quite catch on to his sleight of hand, the scene has shifted.

Widmark's frenzy, as usual, is well played. Ida Lupino is an attractive crooner, and she is also given the season's most novel excuse for shooting a villain: he tried to throw a rock at her.

* His Gabriel over the White House, Washington Merry-Go-Round, and The President Vanishes were considered politically daring when they were made; Blockade and Foreign Correspondent were dynamite before the U.S. entered World War II; Private Worlds was one of the first psychiatric movies; Trail of the Lonesome Pine was the first movie with outdoor color photography.

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