The New Pictures

Stairway to Heaven (Rank; Universal-International)* might be an exceptionally good picture if it didn't strain so desperately to be a great one. It is an imaginative, beautifully Technicolored, British-made fantasy that often trips over its own lofty pretensions.

The British-boy-meets-American-girl story is told with winning charm. David Niven is the British airman who finds himself falling in a burning plane. By radio, he shouts amorous-poetic speeches (he is certain they are his dying words) to a pretty WAC (Kim Hunter) on the landing field. Then he jumps--without parachute. Incredibly, he picks himself up uninjured except for a peculiar crack on the head that makes him imagine he is a fugitive from heaven. Throughout the film, the camera moves between a clinical study of lovesick Niven's brain disorder and the imaginary heaven that wants to straighten out its ledgers by hauling him in. In the big, final scenes, he alternately lies on an operating table and stands before heaven's stern court of justice. Cast and audience are at last persuaded, of course, that Young Love must live, since it is the all-important thing on earth or in heaven.

Despite its pretensions and a dragging opening scene, it is an exciting film, because it boldly experiments in both subject and treatment. It tackles a difficult, fantastic yarn and spins it out with humor and cinematic skill. The sets are clever; direction and photography are first-rate. With the greatest of ease, the story swings back & forth between a pearly-monotone heaven and a dazzling, Technicolored earth. But it bites off too big a hunk and insists on chewing it all. In a clumsy flirtation with the U.S. box office, its makers threw in some boring heavenly discourses on Anglo-American relations (with Canadian-born Raymond Massey as the U.S. spokesman) and some trite philosophizing on everything from the hereafter to the British Empire. These "intellectual" flourishes finally grind even the inoffensive little love story to movie mush.

The makers of Stairway to Heaven--plumpish, rumpled Writer Emeric Pressburger and high-strung, contentious Director Michael ("Micky") Powell--can boast a freedom in their work that few other moviemakers in the world enjoy. Having collaborated on some of Britain's best films (Colonel Blimp, The Invaders) they are one of Cinemogul J. Arthur Rank's most free-reined independent producing units. Mr. Rank picks up their check without bothering too much about the details of what they have ordered.

Powell & Pressburger obviously hope to show their gratitude for their gilded cage by turning out pictures that will make Angel Rank a nice U.S. profit. But many far less creative people on both sides of the Atlantic are already worrying their heads full-time about what the elusive U.S. moviegoer wants. If Powell & Pressburger can leave box-office problems to someone else, they might do a special favor for themselves, for Mr. Rank, for Hollywood and for moviegoers everywhere, by just concentrating on making the best British movies they can.

Abie's Irish Rose (Bing Crosby Producers; United Artists) is a tired old theatrical joke about a Jewish boy and an Irish-Catholic girl. It was undiluted corn a quarter of a century ago; by now, the course of recent history has covered the feeble joke with a rather repellent mold.

Abie long since proved to be impervious to critical assault & battery. It made its author, Anne Nichols, a millionaire several times over with its six years on Broadway (1922-28), innumerable road tours and stock performances, foreign royalties, one previous movie (1928) and a radio soap opera (withdrawn last year by Procter & Gamble after vigorous listener protests). In Manhattan for the premiere, Playwright Nichols predicts that Abie will go on making money for another 25 years.

Bing Crosby, who financed this film version but does not appear in it, thought he was taking all necessary precautions by posting a rabbi, a priest and a Protestant minister on the set as technical advisers during production. But the story's Jewish father is still a pinchpenny, the Irish father is still a belligerent bullhead. It turns out, in 1946, that jokes about racial and religious groups are not really good, clean fun at all.

After a preview last month, representatives of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (and other religious organizations) denounced the movie as "the worst sort of caricature of both Jews and Catholics ... a film that sets us back 20 years. . . ." Director Eddie Sutherland hopefully asserted that 25% of the average moviegoers who have seen the new Abie in seven preview cities have pronounced it "a great plea for tolerance."

The Verdict (Warner), set in late 19th Century London, commits a leisurely murder in a locked room but fails to stir up much interest in whodunit. Either Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre, both obviously untrustworthy characters full of guilty knowledge, lurks suspiciously in every shadow.

The verdict: guilty of tedium in the second degree.

* Opened in London at a November "command performance" for British royalty and visiting Hollywood notables under its British title, A Matter of Life and Death.

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