The New Pictures

Stromboli (RKO Radio). Any film by Director Roberto Rossellini and Actress Ingrid Bergman would seem anti-climactic after their own stormy, thoroughly publicized private lives. As an anticlimax in moviemaking, this one can stand on its own feet. A bleak, draggy little picture, it fulfills neither RKO's prurient advertising claims, nor Rossellini's obviously artistic intentions.

Actress Bergman plays a piece of postwar European flotsam. As a desperate means of getting out of a D.P. camp, she marries a simple Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) and follows him to his native Stromboli, a volcanic island where life is primitive and the islanders hostile. She is appalled to find it no less a prison than the camp she has left.

She tries everything: rebelling openly, putting up with her hard lot and, finally, when she becomes pregnant, scheming to escape. In the film's best scene, she even tries to tempt an island priest (Renzo Cesana) into helping her get away. Finally her wiles succeed with a young lighthouse keeper, who gives her the money she needs to go fleeing across the island.

Overcome by black fumes at the rim of the volcano, she spends the night on a lava bed and awakens (without a smudge on her face) to a morning scene of serene grandeur. Then, with no dramatic preparation but her awed look and a line of dialogue ("What mystery! What beauty!"), an offscreen narrator baldly announces that she has found the religious strength to return to her husband.

Along the way to this clumsy denouement, Stromboli offers some well-shot scenery, a volcanic eruption and an exciting tuna-fishing sequence. Virtually nothing suggests the Rossellini who directed Open City and Paisan. Though he has disowned the film as RKO's tampered version, much of the blame is clearly his.

For Actress Bergman, Stromboli is a triumph of sorts. It gives her the "different" role she had longed for, with a shabby $30 wardrobe and a full range of seamy emotions, and she gives it the full measure of her considerable talent and beauty. But she is surrounded by such mediocrity that her performance seems pathetically wasted. Would-be moralists who are trying to punish her and Director Rossellini for their private transgressions by banning Stromboli might serve their own ends better by having the picture shown as widely as possible.

Three Came Home (20th Century-Fox). A month after Pearl Harbor, U.S.-born Author Agnes Newton Keith, wife of a British colonial official, became a prisoner of the Japanese in North Borneo. Out of her three-year ordeal, she wrote a bestselling factual account of how she and her two-year-old son fared in tropical prison camps until liberation reunited them with the husband whom the Japanese had imprisoned near by. As a movie, done with reasonable fidelity to the book, it is often as harrowing, moving--and sometimes as monotonous--as what the war did to the Keiths.

The picture thoroughly deglamorizes Claudette Colbert in the leading role, and takes pains to recreate authentic Japanese prison compounds against jungle backgrounds filmed in Borneo. It shows considerable restraint in its treatment of Japanese soldiers; there is even a sympathetic Japanese colonel feelingly played by the silent screen's Sessue Hayakawa.

Yet, for all the skill that has obviously gone into it, Producer-Scripter Nunnally Johnson's Three Came Home ought to be better than it is. The title itself eliminates any long-sustained suspense, and reduces the story largely to a string of loosely connected episodes, e.g., an attempted rape, the machine-gunning of out-of-bounds prisoners. Director Jean (Johnny Belinda) Negulesco works so hard at building up the tension each time that the picture verges at times on old-fashioned melodramatics.

At the same time he passes up the chance to document the small, disagreeable details of prison life. Notable exception: a chilling little scene in which Actress Colbert gobbles a messy stew filched out of the officers' garbage, while speculating cheerfully over what she is eating.

The forced breakup and final reunion of-families gives the movie an emotional core that is undeniably affecting. But tearful farewells can pall when protracted and repeated as they are in this script, and Director Negulesco's treatment of emotional scenes, notably at the picture's end, is so contrived to wring the last tear from the audience that it comes perilously close to cheapening them.

Young Man with a Horn (Warner), which starts out to adapt the bestselling story of a jazz musician's integrity, winds up badly in need of some integrity of its own. Suggested vaguely by the career of the late great Bix Beiderbecke, Dorothy Baker's 1938 novel told the story of a hot trumpet virtuoso who is driven and destroyed by the monomania of a jazz perfectionist. The film makes the hero (Kirk Douglas) largely the victim of a bad woman (Lauren Bacall). He is saved by the love of a good one (Doris Day) in time for a happy ending that is as off-key as a leaky cornet.

Enough of the book has stuck to the picture to point up the lost opportunities. The film begins promisingly with the trumpeter as an unloved, unhappy kid (well played by Orley Lindgren) who first discovers music in a mission house piano and musicians in a nightclub's Negro band, then starts to pour his soul into a pawnshop horn. Grown up into a hot trumpet man under the tutelage of the Negro bandleader (Juano Hernandez), he knocks around gin mills and boardinghouses in the sleazy insecurity which hounds all small-time musicians devoted to an unpopular cult. But just when Trumpeter Douglas begins to approach the'top, the film starts on its way down.

Actress Bacall proves to be the turning point of both. Cast as a frustrated intellectual, a part as pretentiously obscure as anything the screen has produced since it learned to talk like a psychoanalyst, she marries Trumpeter Douglas and spreads the frustration around until he hits the bottle and the skids. Before Douglas' artily photographed descent into the Bowery, the picture drags in a sequence killing off the old Negro musician whom it has patronized all along.

Musically, Young Man will offend jazz purists, however it may send the jukebox set. Most of the trumpet work, dubbed by Harry James while Douglas goes skillfully through the motions, is badly out of character. It has all of James's technical finesse but it is often nearly as commercial as the kind of music that Trumpeter Douglas rails against. Jazz fans will also be surprised to learn that a Greenwich Village jazz haunt's customers all wear impeccable evening dress.

As the trumpeter's pianist sidekick, Hoagy Carmichael gives one of his effortless performances. Actor Douglas gives plenty of vitality to the central role, but he is called on to repeat a good deal of what he did in Champion; one scene, in which he bangs a trumpet to pieces and breaks into sobs, is almost a remake of the climax of his earlier film. Having discovered what Actor Douglas does best, Hollywood apparently is determined to work him to death at it.

The Astonished Heart (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) returns Britain's Noel Coward to the screen in the double role of scenarist and star.' For a while, it seems cause for mild celebration. Coward still handsomely fills a Mayfair drawing room with the glitter of verbal bric-a-brac. But when he begins using the stagy artifice of his comedies in behalf of a plot that combines half-baked psychiatry with bogus tragedy, even his admirers are likely to blush for him.

Coward plays a sedately married London psychiatrist who goes off his rocker over a flighty, glamorous divorcee (Margaret Leighton). His devoted wife, played by Celia (Brief Encounter) Johnson, introduces them, goes conveniently off to her mother's place so they can fall in love, and then understandingly dispatches them on a tour of the Continent so they can get the whole ugly mess out of their systems. What drives Coward into the jitters and finally off a housetop is not guilt over his own infidelity--perish the thought--but a suspicious jealousy of his mistress'.

In these ludicrously underplayed dramatics. Miss Leighton's role is the only one with any conviction, and she ably makes the most of it. Wearing his hauteur like a mask and registering most emotions with his eyebrows, Coward almost qualifies for a Broadway revue sketch parodying Noel Coward. In more ways than one, the victim of the piece is Celia Johnson, a fine actress doomed to wear a stiff upper lip through the whole ugly mess.

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