The New Pictures

The Magic Box (J. Arthur Rank; Mayer-Kingsley) is a lavish tribute to British cinema's pioneer William Friese-Greene (played by Robert Donat), who went without recognition during his lifetime, and died in poverty in 1921. The picture, a highly polished, occasionally over-reverent document that was made for last year's Festival of Britain, enlists many of the outstanding names in British films. It has some 70 stars, from Michael Redgrave to Emlyn Williams, in bit roles. It was produced by Ronald (Great Expectations') Neame, directed by John (Seven Days to Noon) Boulting, photographed in Technicolor by Jack (Red Shoes) Cardiff, and adapted by Eric Ambler from Ray Allister's Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor. The result is a cinebiography that is more of a blurred long shot than a clear closeup.

Hewing closely to the facts of Friese-Greene's career, the picture shows his rise to fashionable portrait photographer; his development of Britain's first practical movie camera in 1889 at about the same time that Thomas Edison in the U.S. and Louis Le Prince in France were perfecting their cameras; his death at a British film industry meeting, with nothing in his pocket but a shilling and tenpence. Between laboratory scenes, there is some conventional love interest involving Friese-Greene's two wives (played by Maria Schell and Margaret Johnston).

In a bumbling, Mr. Chips style, Donat plays the idealistic inventor with a good deal of warmth and wit. Best sequence: Friese-Greene excitedly demonstrating his newly perfected magic box by projecting flickering Hyde Park scenes in his laboratory in the dead of night to an audience of one: a stolid, bewildered London bobby, pungently played by Laurence Olivier.

Flowers of St. Francis (Angelo-Rizzoli; Joseph Burstyn) weaves some episodes from the life of Francis of Assisi into a rich cinematic garland. As adapted from the 14th century Fioretti di Francesco d'Assisi by Director & Co-Author Roberto Rossellini, the film is no solemn picture of a dead and embalmed saint, but a warmly human portrait of a humble man who rejected the world for a life of poverty and piety.

The picture opens with young Francis and his twelve disciples returning to Umbria in 1209 after receiving the Pope's blessing for their work. A succession of loosely linked episodes depicts Francis delivering his famous sermon to the birds; the tormented Francis embracing a leper in a moving, wordless scene punctuated only by the clank of the leper's warning clapper and Francis' sobs as he throws himself on the ground; zealous Friar Juniper cutting off a little pig's foot to make soup for a sick brother; Friar Juniper's selflessness triumphing over the bloody tyrant Nicolaio, and causing him to lift his siege of the city of Viterbo in a sequence filled with fire and spectacle. The picture ends with Francis and his disciples going forth separately into the world to preach peace--to Siena, Florence, Arezzo, Pisa and Spoleto.

Except for Aldo Fabrizi, who gives a striking performance as the fiercely mustachioed tyrant, the cast consists entirely of amateurs. Francis and his fellow friars are played by Franciscan monks of the Nocere Inferiore Monastery, who take naturally to Rossellini's direction. Bounding barefoot through the fields in their tattered tunics, they bring a gentle artlessness and a shining simplicity to their roles.

Shot largely around the ancient villages of Bracciano and Soana near Rome, the picture's cold, grey, documentary photography powerfully evokes a world of medieval desolation. At the same time, the picture glows with a warm lyricism. In its blend of tenderness and turbulence, Flowers of St. Francis is a film poem that deserves to rank with Rossellini's own Open City and Paisan.

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