The New Pictures

From This Day Forward (RKO Radio) is a tardy but sincere filming of Thomas Bell's All Brides Are Beautiful, a novel (1936) about Depression in The Bronx. Its theme: the effort of decent, poor newlyweds to live as well as they can. Its thesis: love and fortitude can handle anything that economic injustice throws their way. The story is told mainly in flashbacks as Bill Cummings (Mark Stevens) goes through his old, familiar, woeful process of looking for a job,

He remembers Susan's (Joan Fontaine) sister and brother-in-law (Rosemary De Camp and Henry Morgan), brat-beset and waterlogged in poverty; and how, despite that portentous domestic scene, he and Susan got engaged that evening. He remembers the long, sickening period after he was laid off (from a turret lathe), when he pawned his tools, and pounded the pavements, while Susan's work in a bookstore supported them both. He remembers the long stretch before he was drafted when he worked the night shift in a defense plant and he and Susan saw each other only on their way to & from their jobs. And he remembers Susan's constant desire for a child, and his own constant fear of it, so long as they were so desperately hard up and insecure.

That memory is especially pertinent on this particular postwar evening. For there is no mistake about it this time; Susan is pregnant. And Bill is not at all sure how his interview Monday will turn out. "Scared?" Susan asks. "Sure," he says.

From This Day Forward develops unusual warmth, humaneness and honesty. This is sometimes seriously impaired by patronizing and oversentimental sympathy for simple folk. At a working-class dance, for instance, the couples jig almost as fantastically as high-lifers at a society ball in a Chaplin comedy. The falseness is also indicated in lines like Miss Fontaine's dreamy: "All brides are beautiful --because they're young and full of hope and--they feel sorta shining inside."

Though Miss Fontaine does studiously unstudied things with her legs, makes her voice gallant and common, performs in fact with a good deal of care and skill, her emphasis on words like sorta is that of a Vassarite. She simply isn't that sorta girl. Newcomer Mark Stevens plays with likable, plain dignity. The attention to veterans and their employment problems is by no means sugarcoated; and when the city itself, or the crummier aspects of its life, dominate the screen, the picture has vigor, beauty and authenticity.

The Kid from Brooklyn (Goldwyn-RKO Radio) is an elaborate musical retake of Harold Lloyd's old chump-to-champ hit, The Milky Way (1936), starring ebullient Danny Kaye as a meek milkman. At picture's start, Danny's nag passes out between the shafts. Danny, who has to pull Sam Goldwyn's rather cumbrous vehicle practically unaided, also works like a horse. He delivers the laughs, but they can't drown out a good deal of creaking, clanking and whiffling.

The story is no great help. Timid Milkman Kaye is probably the world's most artful fist-dodger. When his ducking causes the world's middleweight champ and his prognathous trainer (Lionel Stander, who played the same part in the original production) to knock each other cold, the dailies, in eager misunderstanding, give him screamline credit for both victories. Sensing a gate-gross natural, the champ's manager (Walter Abel) tricks the boob into a contract, and arranges a domino row of setups which put the new genius in line for the middleweight crown. Since the champ is in no mood to play setup, the situation looks positively sinister, until this comedy of errors throws a few stiff jabs for the Kid from Brooklyn.

Only the deftest kind of comic manipulation would keep such foolishness fast and light. But deftness is largely lacking. Danny Kaye's Russian patter-piece (Pavlowa) lacks sufficient nightclub edge and intimacy, and most of the ducking and sparring and fight scenes merely swipe you in the face with their comic possibilities.

Still, laughs are a precious commodity these days and, even in an off-picture, Danny Kaye can furnish more than most people. His first setup, portraying pure terror's victory over a brutish pushover, good & funny; funnier still, his buttery effort to put on boxing gloves. Funniest: Kaye, in arduous training for his first fight, kneels lovingly in the grass, pulls, tugs, yanks, heaves, ultimately uproots a daisy.

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