All About Evie

Dear Heart will be called a woman's picture, possibly because it is old hat, old shoes, and hasn't got a thing to put on that everyone hasn't seen a dozen times before. Its heroine is the familiar small-town spinster who stands at the remnant counter of life trying to talk herself into a Big Splurge.

Fresh in from Avalon, Ohio (pronounced Uh-hia), to attend a corn-fed Manhattan postal convention, Evie (Geraldine Page) coyly introduces herself: "I'm a postmaster. Suppose I ought to say postmistress, but that sounds a bit racy." Desperately folksy, she calls the bellhop "Shorty," greets the switchboard operator with: "You sound as if your name ought to be Virginia."

Evie ogles the sights and buys a souvenir Statue of Liberty, but New York's hottest attraction turns out to be a greeting-card salesman named Harry (Glenn Ford). Evie looks at him and feels reckless. He looks at her and decides that she is nothing to write home about. Besides, he already has more than one postmistress. Engaged to a widow in Altoona (Angela Lansbury), he has just ended an affair with Artist Patricia Barry, and is warmly entreating the blonde (Barbara Nichols) at the hotel newsstand to be his "secret pal" for the night. The blonde agrees.

Afterward Harry hates himself, but Evie, when she learns of it, seems to like him even better. He invites her down to the Village to see a flat he has rented for the widow, and of course she thinks it is for her. When she finds out it isn't, she begins to cry. Harry suddenly notes that Evie is not simply one of those eccentric biddies that you hate to sit next to on a plane. She is--well, a person. A real person. Back at the hotel several scenes later, their hands touch to the accompaniment of violins and a timely phone call. "I'm downstairs," snaps the widow. The script holds no further surprises.

Director Delbert Mann, who filmed Marty ten years ago, has enlisted many gifted people to keep Dear Heart thudding along. Thud it does, because it lacks the tough, painful insights that made Marty's small world loom large. Actress Page, who can make a wallflower look like a man-eating plant, strives to read depth and pathos into a role that cracks under the strain, for Scenarist Tad Mosel's out-of-towners can only be taken lightly. They are stereotypes swathed in homespun, plain folks played for hicks.

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