The New Pictures

I've Always Loved You (Republic) is a pretentious soap opera--with Technicolor and music--made by a studio which normally earns its living making simple, workmanlike horse opera. It will delight Rachmaninoff admirers with repeated fine performances of the Piano Concerto No. 2. It will also please moviegoers who enjoy a good cry when an emotionally rattled heroine makes life miserable for herself and her family.

The distraught heroine (Catherine McLeod) is a musically talented Trilby, dominated by her teacher, great Pianist Philip Dorn. With his mother (Mme. Ouspenskaya) as chaperone, they tour the world, lounging around between smashingly successful concerts in what must be the world's flossiest and most costly hotel accommodations. Pianist Philip Dorn is jealous of his talented pupil as a musician, but he never really sees her as a woman until after she has morosely gone off to marry her childhood sweetheart (William Carter).

The marriage is not a happy one. Miss McLeod shuts up her piano and mopes around the house for some 20 years while her daughter grows up and gets ready to play the Piano Concerto No. 2 at Carnegie Hall, just as mother once did.

This long, dull, maddeningly unmotivated story wastes the hard-working actors, famed Director Frank Borzage (Seventh Heaven, Farewell to Arms), the Technicolor, the dressy sets. Only item worth the expense: the brilliant piano playing on the sound track by Artur Rubinstein, who was paid $85,000--a whopping price, even in Hollywood, for a musical background.

Crack-Up (RKO Radio) continues Hollywood's current series of easy lessons in psychiatry. For good measure, the picture also offers cops & robbers and a few rudimentary art lectures on the detection of bogus Old Masters.

The season's oddest bit of casting is Pat O'Brien as an art expert employed by a stuffy museum. One night he barges drunkenly into the museum's chaste lobby with a boozy breath and every indication of an intent to wreck the joint. Has he lost his mind? More likely, he is being framed by the mysterious gang of forgers who hope to snatch the museum's loan collection of masterpieces.

Crack-Up's slam-bang plot never makes a great deal of sense--but it contains some good, fast chases, a fire, a corpse in the dark museum basement and a train crash. Through all the energetic hurlyburly, the hero & heroine look convincingly confused and harried.

Claire Trevor, as art expert O'Brien's intrepid girl friend, shows up in a sensational new hairdo for each new scene, and is nice to look at. Herbert Marshall, who might, at any moment, turn out to be either a crook or a Scotland Yard investi gator, goes about his work with an air of bored relaxation. And if Mr. O'Brien appears to know nothing about art, he obviously knows what thriller addicts like.

Home Sweet Homicide (20th Century-Fox), based on a Craig Rice whodunit, is the carefree story of a mystery novelist-widow (Lynn Bari) whose three crime-conscious children happily solve a neighborhood murder.

The film's mystery is not very mysterious. Neither is the romance between mother and a police lieutenant of the homicide squad (Randolph Scott). But the irrepressible kids (Peggy Ann Garner, 14, Connie Marshall, 8, and Dean Stockwell, 10) are often very funny in their efforts to assist or thwart Police Sergeant Jimmy Gleason.

Craig Rice based her 1944 book on the unreticent personalities of her own three children. A strong flavor of reality is retained in the movie. Three knowing youngsters, raised on lurid crime novels, would doubtless jump at a chance to furnish the real police with clues, red herrings, anonymous letters, innocent suspects, alibis and the rest of fictional murder's razzle-dazzle.

Neighborhood audiences who get a few good laughs of recognition out of Home Sweet Homicide's appallingly familiar children may not mind if the film's mystery and its romance also stay in an all-too-familiar groove.

Is Everybody Happy? (MARCH OF TIME) sets out to prove that modern man, with all his marvelous labor-saving machines, has finally outsmarted himself. In spite of self-shaking cocktail mixers and self-converting auto tops, American men & women of 1946 are jumpy, spiritually and emotionally hungry, fearful of their futures and unsure of their sex appeal.

The heir to all civilization and all smooth-running modern gadgets, the 20th Century citizen, goes to strange places in pursuit of happiness and self-improvement. Every year he spends hundreds of millions of dollars on fortune tellers, medical quacks, "lovelorn experts" of press and radio, palmists, mail-order muscle builders, numerologists, diet faddists, nerve pills, perfumed unguents.

Best shot in this disturbing but laugh-loaded short (18 min.) film: Harvard's famed Earnest Albert Hooton gloomily winding up a deadpan lecture to an anthropology class: "Mechanized and moronic man moves toward extinction. . . . Any questions?"

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