The New Pictures

Devotion (Warner) is a three-year-old strip of damp bark off Warners' wartime backlog. Actually rather better than the average movie, it only looks worse because 1) it is so self-consciously serious, 2) it turns a good movie subject into a peculiarly lifeless romance. The highly romantic subject: the lives & loves--particularly the loves--of the Bronte sisters.

To judge by the film, the sisters were rather like Little Women on an overcast day. Father Bronte (Montagu Love), though a grouch, was not really a bad old sort. Emily (Ida Lupino) found stimulation in a skyline wreck which she called "Wuthering Heights," and frequently flared her nostrils at the moors. Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland), a pretty, man-apt, comfortable soul, was the last sort of girl in the world you would expect to write a novel, even Jane Eyre--which, one gathers, was just a drugstore romance. Arrogant Brother Branwell (Arthur Kennedy), more true to history, drowned in drink his jealousy of his sisters' genius. And Anne (Nancy Coleman) was around a lot, but practically unnoticeable.

Emily carries the burden of the title. She alone understands her brother's woe; he dies in her arms. She alone really knows what love can mean, but hides her own love for the curate (Paul Henreid) because Charlotte loves him, too. Even when Charlotte whisks off to London, to be wined & dined by Thackeray (Sidney Greenstreet), Emily remains faithful to the moors. At length, her death slips the leash for Charlotte and the curate.

Devotion is more literate than the run of screen plays; unfortunately, it is also more literary. Charlotte, represented as a cute little turkey, is the most fictional creature in the film; she also happens to be the most lively and convincing character. Branwell, theatrical as he is, does have his moments of authentic, bitter agony. Odette Myrtil has very little to do as a Brussels schoolmistress, but she does it so well that for a little while the whole film looks intelligent. Such intelligence is the measure of the good movie Devotion might have been. It measures also the general shallowness of feeling, thought and characterization, and the ornate, destructive little successes of the film: a nightmare, silhouettes of black costumes against dead grass, and glimpses of young authoresses in archaic underwear.

The Green Years (MGM) is one of those genteel and interminable stories of "character," "conflict" and "faith" which invariably impress lower-middle-brows as "big," "heartwarming" and, above all, "human."

Robert Shannon, hero of A. J. Cronin's story (little Dean Stockwell and, later on, Tom Drake), is an Irish Catholic orphan, adopted by a Scottish Protestant family. The father (Hume Cronyn), a penny-pinching petty tyrant, sells the child's sole heirloom, a velocipede. The grandmother (Gladys Cooper), a termagant, makes him a green flower-sprigged suit out of a petticoat. The great-grandfather (Charles Coburn), a sort of marked-down Falstaff, heartlessly clips his toenails in the waif's face, but soon shows that this was mere gruffness. The schoolboys tease the orphan about his flowery suit.

Robert, growing older, also has trouble because of his faith. It is shaken when sickness prevents his winning the scholarship that might have made him a doctor. It is sorely pressed when his best friend, hurrying to console him, is killed by a train before his eyes. (Audiences may echo with equal perplexity his plea to God: "Why? Why?") It is destroyed when, despite prayer, his foster-mother dies. With faith gone, it is natural enough for Robert to reject the girl (Beverly Tyler) who wants to marry him: "I know my place" (in the boilerworks), he grates. And with faith rather inexplicably restored by great-grandfather's death, it comes easy enough for him to realize that when a popular novelist so wills it, there's a way even for poor boys like him to go to medical school.

To give the film its due: some elements--especially those which show the struggle of innocence against meanness--are sincerely felt and, in a lumbering, over-stacked way, sympathetically dramatized. There are some experienced performances, notably those of Messrs. Cronyn and Coburn. There are some pleasant appearances: bashful Tom Drake and Beverly Tyler, a good-looking newcomer with a sweet soprano, and eyes a trifle too tricky for her role. The Solemn High Mass and First Communion will move many--and suggest to others that if cinema carries this sort of thing much farther, theaters will have to be consecrated.

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