The New Pictures

The Macomber Affair (Bogeaus-Robinson; United Artists) is a screen version of Ernest Hemingway's excruciating study of the relationships between an ill-married American couple and their hired English hunter-guide, and of the relations of all three to what Hemingway once called "grace under pressure."

Since the three are hunting big game in Africa, the pressures are primitive, and considerable. Macomber (Robert Preston) is a good shot but he lacks courage in a crisis and the sportsman's sense of honor towards his quarry. Besides, he talks too much about himself. The hunter (Gregory Peck), on the other hand, is everything a Hemingway hero should be. Mrs. Macomber (Joan Bennett) is not slow to choose between them nor delicate in showing her preference--in several almost unbearably ugly scenes of cruelty and humiliation. Under the pressures, Macomber finds his courage for the first time in his life. Finding it, his life really begins and his abjectness towards his wife is at an end. Mrs. Macomber promptly shoots him through the head.

According to Hemingway, she shoots him deliberately. According to Mrs. Macomber, in the movie, it was just a tragic accident--and the audience is left to make up its own mind.

Up to this point, Macomber is a brilliantly good job--the best yet--of bringing Hemingway to the screen. None of the three principal players could possibly be improved on; the African landscapes and hunting scenes (which were made in Africa and Mexico) are as believable as a neighbor's backyard. Director Zoltan Korda (Sahara) has already made two films in Africa, which is a help in this particular picture; still more important, he knows people, and style, and atmosphere, and how to make them vivid on a screen. There is hardly a point that Hemingway made in this savage, complex communique about the war between the sexes that Korda and his actors fail to make in movie terms. In fact, a good 95% of Macomber is a remarkably exciting picture for mature audiences. The worst of Hollywood's "improvements" on the original story is the did-she-or-didn't-she ending, which pulls the fuse out of Hemingway's whole payoff.

It Happened in Brooklyn (MGM) features Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson at the tops of their respective voices. It needn't have bothered, so far as the box office is concerned, to do anything more. What little more it does is nearly all to the good. Aside from an overdose of jokes about Brooklyn, everything about the picture is not only unobjectionable but, in a modest way, definitely enjoyable.

Sinatra, as usual, is a shy type who fails to get the girl; he not only sings with great effectiveness (best new song: Time After Time), but performs naturally and unaffectedly. Durante, as a high-school janitor, hasn't much to do beyond proving, without any strain, that he is one of the most likable entertainers in the business. Miss Grayson, prettier and more animated than ever, warbles an aria from Lakme like an eisteddfod of thrushes, and does even better by Mozart's La Ci Darem la Mano, in which she is supported by Sinatra. For good measure young Billy Roy plays the piano impressively, and Peter Lawford hangs around amiably as the shy son of an English duke.

The story doesn't matter much, except that it gives these entertainers a chance to do their work in a relaxed manner and, no less important, to be very nice to each other. By no particularly strange coincidence, that makes an audience feel good, too. Metro has a particular fondness for these experiments in Gemuetlichkeit. When they go wrong, they go awfully wrong. But when they go right--and Scripter Isobel Lennart, who also wrote Anchors Aweigh, seems to have a hand for it--they are something for cinemagoers to be thankful for.

The Farmer's Daughter (RKO Radio) takes a story that is almost as moss-green as its title, and turns it into amusing, lifelike entertainment. The story is not The One About The Traveling Salesman; it is The Other One--about the country girl (Loretta Young) who comes to the big city, gets work as a maid in a mansion, softens up the crusty butler (Charles Bickford), wins over the lady of the house (Ethel Barrymore), takes part in the conversation as she passes the canapes, and eventually romps off with the son of the house (Joseph Cotten).

With minor variations, this story has been used by the movies since movies began. For a long time before that, it was used in paperbacked novels. The chief variations in this one: 1) the family is one of the great political families of its state, 2) the son is a Senator and the dowager is the Party Boss and 3) the country girl herself, no slouch at politics, runs for the Senate on a sort of Common-Woman ticket, against dirty opposition. Like J some of Frank Capra's films, the picture I teaches a few easy-to-take lessons about the good & bad that is possible in a democracy.

But The Farmer's Daughter turns out to be excellent entertainment because Producer Dore Schary and his associates evidently know a good deal about the special kinds of people they are telling about. Whenever the political and bluebook friends of the family gather for cocktails or a council of war, it is a notably convincing and specialized kind of party or council, with minor characters that are beautifully drawn. Miss Young, blonde for the occasion and sporting a Swedish accent,* acts rather like a nice girl playing a charade, yet she is very likable. Messrs.Cotten and Bickford are exceedingly competent. And Ethel Barrymore, besides being invincibly persuasive as a great lady, suggests, with a mere flick of her eyes, that she has enough political savvy to save the nation.

* Rumpled into her diction by Ruth Roberts, who irons it out of Ingrid Bergman's.

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