New Picture

The Human Comedy (M.G.M.) is a faithful translation of William Saroyan's novel (TIME, March 1); hence it is like no other picture that ever came out of Hollywood. Such things as plot worry Saroyan not at all. People are the grist for his mill, and the Macauleys of Ithaca, Calif, are good grist. Saroyanesquely naive one moment, they are profound the next; now smug and annoying, now simple and lovable. Definitely, they are human beings, and fortunately the story of their day-today, small-town lives is told with few of the irrelevancies that Saroyan usually contrives. There is a characteristic lack of reticence in the telling, but the story survives and prospers.

Homer Macauley (Mickey Rooney) is a 14-year-old Postal Telegraph boy, "the fastest-moving thing in San Joaquin valley." He supports his fatherless family, runs the 220 low hurdles in school, is fresh to his history teacher and fights with a snob, one Hubert Ackley III. After school, Homer learns to be a man. His teachers are his boss, benevolently eccentric Tom Spangler (James Craig), and old Grogan (Frank Morgan) the telegrapher, who drinks every night to forget the sad messages that come over his wire. Freckled, four-year-old Ulysses (Jack Jenkins), called "Useless" for short by his playmates, is Homer's kid brother. He constantly asks unanswerable questions, learns about life from such simple but significant incidents as a Negro's friendly wave from a passing freight train. Other Macauleys: Mother (Fay Bainter), Sister Bess (Donna Reed), who goes to college, and Brother Marcus (Van Johnson), who is in the Army.

The leisurely picture chronicles small but curiously moving adventures: Homer's delivery of a War Department message to a dead soldier's mother; Ulysses' & friends' raid on a forbidden apricot tree; the pursuit of Tom Spangler by a rich young pretty (Marsha Hunt); Bess and her girl friend picking up three lonely soldiers; Marcus playing hymns on his concertina in a troop train. The sum total of these screen adventures never quite attains the soaring enthusiasm of Saroyan's novel, and some of the preaching is hard to take. Yet at its best The Human Comedy is immensely moving. Even its preaching sometimes achieves an eloquence that gives the picture a psychological fifth dimension.

The Saroyan touch leaves nothing ordinary; the film is electric with the joy of life. It gets this quality partly from the acting of Mickey Rooney, who, despite some persistent Andy Hardy mannerisms, is for once something besides a showoff. But the real star of The Human Comedy is five-year-old Jack Jenkins. When he startles a bearded scholar in the town library by suddenly poking his freckled, wistful face before the man's eyes, the film sings. Best scene is the one in which he learns the meaning of "I'm afraid." A human advertising robot in a drugstore window does it. The robot glares at Ulysses and the boy runs screaming down the street.

Saroyan wrote The Human Comedy as a scenario (the novel was an afterthought), sold it to M.G.M. for $60,000 on the understanding that he would direct the picture. Assigned to practice on a short, the temperamental Mr. Saroyan soon got so fed up with the studio's "continuous and disgraceful crying, trembling and shaking" that he walked out.

M.G.M. then gave The Human Comedy to veteran Director Clarence Brown (Garbo's "Man Friday," director of Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight). It was a good choice. Brown has a higher opinion of cinema audiences than most of his Hollywood contemporaries have. Says he: "If you can ever get the average man inside a theater to see a high-class movie, he comes out satisfied." To get the average man in, there is Mickey Rooney. For satisfaction there is little Jack Jenkins, whom the director discovered on the beach at Santa Monica and straightway signed for the part.

Premiered with much fanfare in Manhattan last fortnight, The Human Comedy is not, as the Hays office gurgled, the "greatest motion picture" ever made. But it may well be the most talked-about movie of 1943.

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