The New Pictures

Mother Is a Freshman (20th Century-Fox) is a featherbrained variation on one of Hollywood's most cherished myths: that U.S. Moms up to the age of 40 should be able, at the drop of a mink stole, to look and act like their teen-age daughters. The plot, as silly as a schoolgirl's endorsement of a beauty soap, is just about as inventive.

Loretta Young is a Park Avenue widow who finds herself temporarily broke. She gets a scholarship to Pointer College, where she joins her pretty daughter (Betty Lynn) in pursuit of higher education and a youngish English professor (Van Johnson). With the help of the "Kissing Oak" and other standard campus props, Mother gets her man, and Betty gets compensation in the form of a stripling her own age.

Out of this bit of nonsense Director Lloyd Bacon might have squeezed a few touches of light satire or screwball comedy. Instead he has played it cute and coy. The only really cute thing in the movie is Betty Lynn, who fits her role as snugly as she fits her sweater. The rest, including Rudy Vallee as another pince-nezed fuddy-duddy, is synthetic fluff, which ought to do well in the neighborhood houses by the time hot weather comes.

Down to the Sea in Ships (20th Century-Fox), first filmed in 1922, was a brawling forerunner of today's semidocumentary, despite a sugary love story and the presence of Clara ("the It Girl") Bow, who was rolled aboard in a barrel. For the old silent version, Director Elmer Clifton persuaded the citizens of New Bedford, Mass, to supply the cash and most of the cast. Then he chartered a real whaler, and along with his cameramen and a crew of real whaling men, set out for the Caribbean to catch real whales.

The new version, directed by documentary-minded Henry Hathaway (The House on 92nd Street), might have been a real humdinger in the same tradition. Unfortunately, it rarely gets much nearer to a real whale than a few tons of refrigerated blubber and some background footage of Pacific whales lazing about off the coast of Southern California. To offset this handicap, canny Skipper Hathaway has concentrated on character study, backed by careful casting and straightforward camera work.

The story, which happily bears no resemblance to the 1922 script, concerns three males. On the eve of his last voyage, old Captain Joy (Lionel Barrymore), New Bedford's No. 1 whaler, faces a dilemma. Should he once again take along his orphaned, sea-struck grandson (Dean Stockwell) or leave him ashore to catch up on his book learnin'? In Boston-trained Dan Lunceford (Richard Widmark) he finds a plot-making compromise. Lunceford, he figures, has enough schooling to keep both a ship and Little Jed's education afloat. After a slow, landlubberly beginning, the three of them, with Dan as first mate, set sail for the whaling grounds and a few stern lessons in character-building.

Down to the Sea is no great picture, but it is tight enough at the seams to be seaworthy. Its big moments--notably the harpooning and the ship's tangle with an iceberg in the fog--have a fast-moving drive and conviction. Despite an occasional whiff of the studio, they have a real sea smell.

Director Hathaway keeps a firm rein on the tear jerking potentials of the story and in particular on Lionel Barrymore, who gives one of his best performances.* Dean Stockwell does his tousle-headed best by a somewhat sticky role and Richard Widmark, in his first crack at playing a sympathetic part, is topnotch.

Caught (Enterprise; MGM) is distinguishable from other psychiatric movie melodramas in only two respects: i) it is worse than most, and 2) it is the first U.S.-made showcase for the glowering talents of British Cinemenace James Mason. By a perverse switch in casting, Robert Ryan plays the man with the sinister, tortured neuroses that have hitherto been Mason's stock in trade.

Ryan is a rich and violent playboy who suffers from psychosomatic heart attacks and a psychotic code of behavior: what he cannot dominate, he must destroy. Unable to dominate the pretty little model (Barbara Bel Geddes) whom he has married just to spite his psychiatrist, he sets out to break her. To escape his brutality, she runs away to find a job--and love--with an earnest young doctor (Mason) on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Before he suffers his climactic heart attack, Ryan is called upon, for considerable ugly sneering and snarling brutality. Presumably, these familiar movie symbols of mental illness are supposed to give audiences the shudders. Caught's real shocker lies in its callous assumption that paranoia is a specific form of villainy to be exploited at the box office.

* To grab this juicy role, Barrymore climbed out of his weelchair and on to his crutches for the first time sice 1937 when he fractured his right hip on the set of Saratoga.

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