The New Pictures

Vacation from Marriage (MGM) is a warm, gentle, wise little Britain-in-wartime comedy, excellently acted by a British cast, excellently directed by Sir Alexander Korda.

The opening shot: a long, impersonal look across the slate roofs and smoking chimney pots of middle-class London. Barrage balloons ride high on their cables, and the sun is coming up over Europe and the Channel. Next comes a look through a grimy windowpane straight into the domestic life of Cathie and Robert Wilson.

Cathie (Deborah Kerr) represents wifely charm in a mousey woolen bathrobe, a muffler around her neck, sleep in her eyes, a cold in her nose. In an early-morning coma, Robert (Robert Donat) moves speechless and heavy-lidded about the drab little flat. First, the clean collar, the neat cravat. Then a cup of tea, a glance at the clock, a peek at the barometer, and down the stairs and off to his job as a bookkeeper, a symbol of hopeless, conventional timidity.

The war makes the Wilsons say a frightened goodbye to all that, taking Robert from his ledgers and stiff collars into the Royal Navy, leaving Cathie with nothing better to do than to close the flat and join the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens). Thus begins their vacation from marriage. It ends some three years later in a transformation which may not strike hardened cinemaddicts as particularly surprising. But the picture holds together nicely, and without the customary Hollywood glue, goo and garnish.

Charming Cinemactress Kerr (Major Barbara, Colonel Blimp) plays the early, mousey Cathie as though she herself sniffled through breakfast every morning in bathrobe and muffler. She also looks miraculously fetching in the blue serge suit and black cotton stockings of "a Wren. Versatile Cinemactor Donat (The 39 Steps, Goodbye, Mr. Chips) seems happy in what is probably the freest, freshest comedy role he has ever had, and grows young even more gracefully than he grew old in the James Hilton heartwringer.

Equal honors must go to Britain's Hungarian-born Producer-Director Alexander Korda (knighted by George VI in 1942), who gives to the story that air of authenticity and apparent artlessness which has become a sort of hallmark of the best British pictures.

Colonel Effingham's Raid (20th Century-Fox), from the novel by Berry Fleming, tells the story of W. Seaborn Effingham (Charles Coburn), a garrulous, fabulous old Southern colonel who descends on a small city in Georgia and, before he has finished, practically turns the place upside down. The picture depends mostly upon the colonel's warlike antics and vocabulary, and upon some mild byplay involving William Eythe and Joan Bennett as newspaper reporters. The local color possibilities were enormous, but the producer and director of this picture evidently didn't think them worth the trouble. Most of the characters talk and act like damyankees; the scenery is strictly studio-lot Georgian; there are apparently not more than a couple of bottles of Coca-Cola in the entire town. It is all so little like an actual Georgia locale that Rome, Athens, La Grange, and points south needn't give it a second thought.

Deadline at Dawn (RKO-Radio) puts the corpse right in the middle of the carpet. Badman Val Bartelli (Joseph Calleia) stands over it, shaking with rage. Who has had the effrontery to bump off his dear sister Edna? Perhaps it was the fat, blind pianist who used to be her husband. Maybe it was the slick theatrical producer who wrote the bum check found in her apartment. Possibly it was a jaded Broadway taxi-dancer (Susan Hayward), a gabby old cab-driver (Paul Lukas), a dopey kid in a sailor suit (Bill Williams). As hardboiled Big City cops-&-killer dramas go, Deadline at Dawn is one of the better ones. It is lifted out of the run-of-the-corpse routine by earnest playing, good lighting and photography, drumfire dialogue by Playwright Clifford Odets.

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