The New Pictures

Virtue took an awful beating in the week's films. To a woman, the heroines remained beautiful and bewitching as they sassed their mothers, neglected their children, poisoned their husbands, betrayed their lovers, sauntered in & out of jail, indulged such other foibles as highway robbery, adultery, shoplifting.

Temptation (Universal-International) comes about as close as the Johnston Office will permit in letting Merle Oberon get away with murder. Adapted from a musty Robert Hichens novel called Bella Donna (forerunner of the stories with spiced-up Mediterranean settings that used to run in Hearst's Cosmopolitan magazine), the turgid old yarn has been tried three times before in the movies. The verdict, in spite of its fine feathers, stylish production and highfalutin misbehavior, is guilty--too sluggish for 1946.

The picture's main concession to period realism: Miss Oberon's remarkable hourglass figure, apparently devised by an efficient studio make-up department to set off her eye-popping 1900 wardrobe. Merle plays an unprincipled baggage who succeeds in marrying Archeologist George Brent over the protests of Brent's worldly friend and physician, Dr. Paul Lukas. After a few days in turn-of-the-century Egypt, surrounded by her husband's tiresome scientific friends, Merle gets a discontented look in her eye.

While Brent goes digging in the tomb of Ramses V, she takes to lounging around in the incense-heavy den of her blackmailer-lover (Charles Korvin), plotting her husband's murder. By the time Brent's system has absorbed about all the slow poison it will stand, Merle suddenly searches her heart and discovers that her husband, after all, is the man she really, truly loves. With no alternative, the unhappy lady briskly feeds the knockout powders to her lover instead.

The father, Marcus, ostracized by his Alabama townspeople but dominating the town, is as fascinating a character as Playwright Hellman has drawn. Cruel-cold-blooded, with a sardonic wit and a partly pretentious feeling for culture, he cares only, and then half-incestuously, for his daughter Regina. His treatment of his wife, along with her knowledge of his guilty past, has made her a violent hysteric; his contempt for his sons, the power-craving Ben and the spineless Oscar, has made them bitterly hostile. The fiercest struggle is that between Ben and his father. Constantly defeated, at the moment when he seems finally beaten Ben ferrets out of his mother his father's guilty secret. Being enough to lynch his father, it is more than enough to break him. Ben now rules the roost.

With its vivid characters and its caustic, angry tone, Another Part of the Forest is more than just gripping theater. Yet it is not quite large-sized drama. It builds powerfully, but to something not big enough. After such strong-willed people have been locked so long in conflict, there should be some kind of explosion from within themselves. Instead, melodrama is catapulted from without. A tricking-the-trickster that would be just right for rounding off a cold hard comedy about mere knaves is a little short-weight for people as generally base and passionate as they are specifically greedy.

Finely staged by the author, Another Part of the Forest is, much of it, finely acted. In particular, Percy Waram (The Late George Apley) plays Marcus quietly, with magnificent expressiveness, and Mildred Dunnock (The Corn Is Green) gives touching force to Marcus' broken, half-batty wife. And Jo Mielziner has provided what may well become his most famous sets.

That Brennan Girl (Republic) shows the effects of a sordid environment on an impressionable adolescent. The story, by Adela Rogers St. Johns, is a well-made, sob-sisterish superb with a newspaper-serial flavor.

The wretched girl (Mona Freeman) never had much chance to be respectable. Her tough, pretty mother (June Duprez) didn't want a big kid like her hanging around the house. Disguised as ma's little sister, the youngster matured fast into a bright, hard-surfaced young woman. She had clever fingers that could roll a drunken sailor and lift costume jewelry from the department store that employed her. From her two best men friends (James Dunn and William Marshall) she kept hearing pleasant rumors of how sweet and wonderful a real mom can be. But it takes the searing, purifying fires of her own motherhood to make a law-abiding woman of her.

The weight of a dampish plot hangs on the young mother's efforts to get away from baby long enough for an occasional hour of fun in the evenings. Some of the explicit, painfully realistic scenes are designed to scare the daylights out of parents who make a habit of leaving their young ones with teen-age sitters.

The Wicked Lady (Rank; Universal-International) tosses some semiconscious spoofing at all plumed-hat melodramas. Made more than a year ago in England, where it has been a box-office smash, this movie was frowned on by U.S. censors until some reshooting eliminated the low-cut Restoration dresses worn by the two leading actresses (TIME, Aug. 5). The moralists believe that the picture is now fit for U.S. moviegoers.

It is a frenzied cloak & dagger charade that will never be fit for anyone to take too seriously. Amid the romantic highwaymen, secret passages and poisoned elderberry wine, the bogus sentiments expressed by the actors are a perfect match for the bogus look of their hair pieces. With Margaret Lockwood romping through the man-crazy, trigger-happy title role, several other competent British players (James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones, Felix Aylmer) are involved in the breast-beating and eye-rolling.

Cinemogul Rank has recently sponsored a few excellent, skillfully made films that are giving the British product a good name in the U.S. This is not one of them.

Carmen (Scalera-Superfilm) is the same hot-blooded, unfettered gypsy hussy she always was ("free Carmen has been, and free she will always be"). This version, without singing, was begun in Italy in 1943 with French-speaking actors. Its plot is closer to the original Merimee short story (1847) than to the opera (1875), but the Bizet score is used--much too cautiously--as background music.

The producers have turned the old melodrama into a pretty fast movie script: Escamillo's smugglers gallop back & forth across the mountains just like horse opera's cattle rustlers. But a little of the heavy dust that Carmen has accumulated in the last hundred years remains. The photography is expertly beautiful.

Even more beautiful is the leading lady, France's Viviane Romance, who resembles an alert Linda Darnell and has been treated to a full Hollywood glamor makeup, including false eyelashes.

Carmen has been filmed at least ten times, but moviegoers have by no means seen the last of the wench. A Manhattan theater is currently showing an Argentine-made version. A U.S. producer is toying with the idea, and Britain's Alexander Korda has announced a forthcoming Carmen with Paulette Goddard in the lead.

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