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The Secret Heart (MGM) offers psychiatry with a dash of Debussy--a mixture that moviegoers go for this season.

Claudette Colbert is a dauntless, stylish, long-suffering widow who has turned her back on love (Walter Pidgeon) in order to raise two stepchildren and pay off her late husband's debts. The stepson (Robert Sterling), just home from the Navy, is a nice, levelheaded boy. But the stepdaughter (June Allyson) is something straight out of Freud. Since no one has ever told her that the adored father who died when she was five was a weakling, a dipsomaniac and a thief, June sits all day at the piano, strumming Debussy and mooning over daddy's memory. Meanwhile, stepmother Claudette works her fingers to the bone on the big real-estate deals that keep the family going.

The movie is a smooth, stagy, offhand treatment of a worrisome subject. Mentally, June is plainly a very sick girl--if not definitely off her trolley. Yet everyone in the cast treats her as if she were merely indulging a fit of the sulks. Old Dr. Lionel Barrymore, a psychiatrist this time, is called in briefly for a diagnosis, but he is not really turned loose on June's case. She is allowed to run around with her dangerous father-fixation--messing up Miss Colbert's love life and attempting suicide--until she catches a young man of her own. By that time, audiences may have the uneasy feeling that she would be a good deal better off under close and constant observation.

Till the Clouds Roll By (M-G-M), a glamorized biography of the late Jerome Kern, piles Ossa on Pelion, Mt. Everest on top of that, and garnishes with a couple of dozen minor ranges. It is not exactly strong on story. The only clouds in Composer Kern's life--Broadway's onetime preference for English tunes, and Kern's avuncular concern over his arranger's problem daughter--seem to have been no bigger than a man's hand, and just about as unusual. But for those who like popular music and attractive entertainers, the story will be no more troublesome than a sack race: the movie gets there just the same.

Some 25 of the pleasanter personalities M-G-M owns or could snag for the occasion are on hand, and they go through about two dozen of Kern's graceful, contagious tunes, neck-deep in sumptuous production. Van Johnson does a highly self-appreciative song& -dance--looking, unfortunately, a little as if he should be carrying a roast apple in his mouth. Judy Garland is charming as the late Marilyn Miller and still more charming when she sings Who? Dinah Shore gives special warmth to They Didn't Believe Me and The Last Time I Saw Paris. Lena Home sings Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man and Why Was I Born? with as much careful intensity as if she were expounding existentialism. Frank Sinatra does Ol' Man River nicely but with a reverence that robs the song of its all-important drive. Robert Walker is Kern and Van Heflin is his arranger.

CURRENT & CHOICE

It's a Wonderful Life. A wonderful, hokum-filled fable in which Producer-Director Frank Capra and Actor James Stewart stage a triumphantly sentimental Hollywood homecoming (TIME, Dec. 23).

The Best Years of Our Lives. Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright and Harold Russell in Director William Wyler's moving, honest, highly polished movie about the postwar world (TIME, Nov. 25).

Les Enfants du Paradis. Three hours of sharp, cynically witty scenes add up to a refreshingly aimless, very French film made during the Occupation (TIME, Nov. 25).

My Darling Clementine. Director John Ford's handsome horse opera with Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell and Victor Mature (TIME, Nov. 11).

Brief Encounter. Skillful British-made tearjerker, from a Noel Coward playlet (TIME, Sept. 9).

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