New Picture

The Pied Piper (20th Century-Fox) pipes sumptuous Monty ("The Beard") Woolley out of his wheel chair for the first time since he began playing The Man Who Came to Dinner (TIME, Jan. 26) three years ago. The change is good for him. The belligerent old nanny goat turns into a very human portrait of a crotchety, kindly Englishman caught in France by the Nazi invasion. But kindliness does not prevent elegant Actor Woolley from walking off with the picture against the trying competition of six scene-stealing children.

Piper Woolley is never quite sure how he came by all of them. He started with two: the son and daughter of a League of Nations official and his wife. After Dunkirk he agreed, with the massive reluctance of a club-bound, child-hating Englishman, to take them to England while their parents returned to Geneva.

It is no sentimental journey. First Ronnie (Roddy McDowall) and the empire builder fall out over Rochester, N.Y. The old codger insists that it is "a State somewhat northeast of the New England Colony." The boy knows better, and says so. Then his sister, Sheila (Peggy Ann Garner), gets trainsick, throws up for miles until the Paris train is stopped by the advancing Nazis. Soon Rose (Fleurette Zama) joins the party--at Ronnie's invitation. Snorts Woolley: "I do not propose to become the Mecca for every unfortunate child!"

Later Pierre (Maurice Tauzin) falls in. A chance nose count by Pied Piper Woolley reveals that a towheaded Dutch waif named Willem (Merrill Rodin) is also with them. Says Woolley: "I am occasionally seized with the conviction that I am convoying guinea pigs."

A brush with the Gestapo nearly ends the Piper's tour, but, at least in Hollywood, Englishmen like Woolley always win through. His children's crusade, scripted by Producer Nunnally Johnson from Nevil Shute's novel of the same name, is too episodic for all-out drama, but it is a mellow, amusing, often moving excursion.

Good sequence: Woolley's last waif, the half-Jewish niece of a Gestapo agent, is brought to the dock for transshipment to the U.S. with the help of the Piper. She heils Hitler. Her Gestapo uncle reproves her. "Nicht mehr Heil Hitler?" she asks. "Nein," warns her uncle. "Gut!" says the solemn little girl.

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