The New Pictures

The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (20th Century-Fox) has just about everything the mass public is said to want. It has Ingrid Bergman in a part so flagrantly sympathetic that Hollywood may not dare refuse her a third Oscar. It has Curt Juergens, a German matinee idol who looks like John Wayne with a monocle scar, and it has the late Robert Donat, playing a sort of Chinese Mr. Chips in his most magniloquent style of maudlin. It has Cinema-Scope, DeLuxe color, 2,000 Chinese extras, a $5,000,000 budget, a $450,000 set, a running time of 157 minutes--without an intermission. It has love, war, religion, riot, murder, spectacle, horror, comedy, music, dancing, miscegenation, cops, robbers, concubines, children, horses, the best scenery in Wales, the worst chinoiserie ever seen on screen, a success story that is invincibly feminist and relentlessly cheery, and more sheer treacle than anybody has seen since the Great Boston Molasses Flood.*

The film is said to be based on the life of Gladys Aylward, an English missionary. But somehow, as tricked up and blooped out to fill the CinemaScope screen, the woman's simple story comes to seem rather like a Cecil B. DeMille version of Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. The heroine (Bergman) is a London parlormaid who announces one day to her employer that "God wants me to go to China." The man is so startled that he lets himself be persuaded to help her get there, even though the regular missionary organizations have rejected her as "not qualified"--she has had very little formal education.

She travels alone across Siberia, settles finally in a remote valley in North China, sets up a sort of motel for mule drivers ("the newspapers of North China") and has somebody tell them Bible stories while they eat. Meanwhile, she makes friends with the local mandarin (Donat), who gives her a civil service job as his Foot Inspector during the height of the campaign against binding the feet of female children; after that, the cheerful, hardworking, God-fearing young woman is known for miles around as "Jen-Ai" (The One Who Loves People). She fights for the rights of women and prisoners, brings medicine to the local bandits, makes a home for strays and orphans, and falls in love with a Eurasian colonel (Juergens) in the Chinese National army.

Then the Japanese attack, and for the rest of the movie, Bergman drifts among the battles like a montage of Bruennhilde and Florence Nightingale--until she turns, toward the end, into Mrs. Moses, and marches about 100 motherless children across miles of rugged country, through the enemy's lines, to safety with the Chinese forces.

The pity is that in itself the story is strongly moving. The sacrifice of self for the sake of others is surely one of the profoundest experiences that human beings have attained, and it is not often that this experience has been so sharply dramatized as it is in the life of Gladys Aylward. Something of the woman's flame-simple, stone-actual spirit is unquestionably preserved in the film, but all too often the religious force of her example is prettily dissipated in the delusive grandeurs of the wide screen, and safely explained away in entertainingly heroic tropes and grossly commercial moments of the heart.

Auntie Mame (Warner) is a relative delight--part inlaw, part outlaw--who came slinking onto the American scene in Patrick Dennis' 1955 bestseller (2,250,000 copies). Then she swaggered onstage as the addle-headed but triumphant heroine (Rosalind Russell) of a Broadway smash (639 performances) that still has three companies (Constance Bennett, Sylvia Sidney, Eve Arden) on the road and one (Bea Lillie) in London. Now she has been preserved on celluloid, and Actress Russell has done the job with such invincible Rozmatazz that as a comic cliche Charley's Aunt bids fair to be replaced in the public mind by Patrick's.

In itself the film, like the play, is no more than a slick succession of ancient blackouts and vaudeville wheezes ("[Wear] your hair natural." "If I kept my hair natural . . . I'd be bald."). But that is quite enough for Comedienne Russell, who likes a bad joke better than a good one because it gives her a chance to improve it. In Auntie Mame, presenting herself as the utter auntithesis of middle-class respectability, she fills skit after lifeless skit with a tinny, ginny vitality. When she sits down to it, a harmless telephone switchboard suddenly turns into a writhing, homicidal octopus. When she attacks her morning hairdo, the hair seems to launch a spirited counterattack, and for the next three minutes or so Roz reels about the screen like a bemused Medusa. And surely there are few actresses who could convey, by the merest dilation of a sensitive nostril, the exquisite feelings of a mountain climber's widow who consoles her loss by casually scattering rose petals on a glacier.

* On Jan. 15, 1919, a giant vat burst, and 2,320,000 gallons (14,000 tons) of molasses flooded Boston's North End, battering down nearby buildings and houses, smashing the elevated railway, drowning and crushing 21 people and several dozen horses.

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