The New Pictures

State Fair (20th Century-Fox), a Technicolored, Rodgers-&-Hammerstein tuning-up of the Phil Stong novel, is meant to be as happy as a hayride down the middle aisle of Oklahoma! The spacious, easygoing story:

Iowa Farmer Frake (Charles Winninger), his wife (Fay Bainter), their son Wayne (Dick Haymes) and their daughter Margy (Jeanne Grain) go to the big State Fair. Farmer Frake's heart is set on winning the Grand Award with his titanic boar. Blue Boy. Mrs. Frake's hopes reside in her crock of heavily spiked mincemeat. Wayne meets and falls for a redhead (Vivian Blaine) who sings with Tommy Thomas' band, and Margy picks up with a Des Moines reporter (Dana Andrews).

Blue Boy, melancholic with love for a redheaded sow, acts his age in time to triumph. One of the judges yields to the beast in him when he tastes Mrs. Frake's brandied mincemeat, so she too triumphs. The son and daughter also finally win their hearts' desires. (Good bit: Margy's and the reporter's innocent embrace when "their" horse wins a harness race, their embarrassed withdrawal, their sudden, serious kiss.)

While all this business is going on, the company gives out with four fine tunes by Richard Rodgers (lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II). The two most likely to succeed: It's a Grand Night for Singing and It Might as Well Be Spring.

Mr. Hammerstein has written a screen play as pleasing and deft as his lyrics. If the picture had delicacy and imagination to match its competence and good humor --and if its pastoral charm had real outdoor authenticity, instead of a germless soundstage look--State Fair might have become an entertainment classic. As it stands, it should be a solid hit.

Pride of the Marines (Warner), adapted from Roger Butterfield's true story, Al Schmid, Marine, is Hollywood's most serious attempt yet to picture some of the problems of returning servicemen.

Hero Al Schmid (John Garfield), a 21-year-old Philadelphia machinist, joined the Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor and became a machine-gunner. One night on Guadalcanal, defending a river crossing, he killed some 200 Japanese. Toward morning, a grenade went off in his face and ended the war, for him, in blindness.

For months, doctors worked on Al's eyes without much result and without much hope, while friends, without much result or much hope either, worked to renew his will to live. Pride, bitterness, fury, self-pity, despair engulfed him.

Without letting her know what was wrong with him, he did his best to break off with his sweetheart, Ruth Hartley (Eleanor Parker). But thanks to her love and patience, the pep talks of his fellow marine Lee Diamond (Dane Clark) and the kindliness of a Red Cross worker (Rosemary De Camp), he was finally won back into human circulation.*

Even when it drags, the screen story of Al Schmid has a compelling doggedness and honesty. The cast, especially Messrs. Garfield and Clark, put it over with a notable absence of affectation. The picture's single, sustained combat sequence is keenly written and filmed, fiercely exciting, with its shrilling obbligato of the enemy's "Mreen yoo dyee (Marine, you die!) Mreen tonight yoo dyee!" set against the jabbing technical chatter of the frantically overworked machine-gun crew.

It is also exciting--because the screen is so unaccustomed to plain talk--to see and hear the angry discussion of postwar prospects which Scripter Albert Maltz has written for the hospitalized marines. Effectively outspoken, too, is Lee Diamond's reminder, to Al, that blindness gives him no monopoly on job handicaps--that Diamond himself has been plentifully handicapped all his life because he is a Jew.

But Pride of the Marines is more than a rostrum for liberal polemics. It is a good hard-hitting movie.

Lady on a Train (Universal) sets out to elicit chills and chuckles, but never quite reaches its modest destination.

Soon after seeing murder done through a bleak window, Deanna Durbin (the lady) gets off the train, and begins a half-farcical, half-melodramatic hunt for the killer. She is variously helped and hin dered by assorted menaces, red herrings and foozlebrains -- like Ralph Bellamy and Dan Duryea (as two brothers who loathe each other), George Coulouris (a devilish butler), Allen Jenkins (a sinister chauffeur), David Bruce (a mystery author), and Edward Everett Horton (Edward Everett Horton).

The lady, of course, takes time out to sing. Her Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh? feels like fingers teasing the ribs. Lolling on a bed, she sings Silent Night to her father by long-distance telephone, while the camera treats her the way John Gilbert used to treat Garbo, in a manner that must be seen to be believed. For fanciers of the strange and terrible, Miss Durbin's quietly orgiastic salute to the Nativity is a must.

Bewitched (M.G.M.) is a double-personality melodrama with double-medium antecedents. Directed by radio's Arch Oboler, who adapted it from his own "best original air drama of 1938," the picture both gains and loses by its crossbreeding : the dialogue and sound track are so urgent and explicit, and what transpires on the screen so comparatively conventional, that you could get the whole show with your eyes shut. Even so, it makes a rather interesting movie. The story:

A gentle young woman (played with great charm by Phyllis Thaxter) begins to be tortured by an ever more insistent inner voice, which urges her to throw over her fiance (Henry H. Daniels Jr.), leave her parents, and disappear. The voice wins. By the time her fiance finds her, a young lawyer (Horace McNally) is in love with her, and the inner voice has revealed itself as an industrious natural force whose components are lust and murder.

At the behest of this alter ego, the girl kills her fiance. Then she goes toward the chair almost eagerly, in her desire to liquidate her inner devil--while the lawyer-lover, an ingenious psychiatrist (Edmund Gwenn), and the governor of the state stand by, wondering what to do. The psychiatrist finally does plenty.

By giving the inner voice (and numerous subsidiary mental voices) unusual expressiveness, Arch Oboler has, at best, achieved cinema's first really effective use of internal monologue. At worst, he goes so far with the trick of building intensity through reiteration that it recalls Fred Allen's parody of Norman Corwin: a poetic drama about Jack & Jill in which a cheering section of inner voices, in accelerating crescendo, badger the heroine with "Jill Jacobowsky, Jill-Jacobowsky Jill-Jacobowsky JILL-JACOBOWSKY!"

*In Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife and year-old son, Al Schmid now spends his time typing letters to old buddies, listening to Bing Crosby recordings and fishing. Doctors look for no improvement in his eyesight, which is limited to perception of bright colors and moving objects.

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