The New Pictures

The Egg and I (Universal-International), an adaptation of Betty MacDonald's cackle-happy best-seller about a city couple who learn to run a poultry farm, will probably be just as popular as the book. Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, who pretend to be the distraught pioneers, are sure-fire box-office comedians. And the show is rife with sure-fire laughs.

The picture is, indeed, just a little bit too sure-fire for its own good. It has some faint hints of realistic rustic meanness and kindliness. It also has moments of innocently ribald energy which may not be wholly authentic to the backwoods, but are pretty good as lively, half-demented comedy. Against its bits of honest humor, MacMurray's portrait of a stock Hollywood goof and Miss Colbert's skilled smirking over situations which might better have been played straight look flashily flimsy and false. The picture has a lot of fun in it, but it will be most amusing to those who are content to smirk too.

Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main, as decayed neighbors, are worked for a good deal of the great deal they are worth. The plot also bears down hard on MacMurray's interest (invented for the screen) in a rich lady farmer (Louise Allbritton) who drives a station wagon. It ends, happily, as soon as Miss Colbert has battled nature just long & hard enough to harvest her first baby.

Calcutta (Paramount) is a conventional, well-made melodrama about two U.S. airmen (Alan Ladd, William Eendix) who undertake to find out who killed their best friend, and why. In the course of finding out, Ladd and the dead man's sweetheart (Gail Russell) make uneasy but interested eyes at each other. There is some effective singing in a nightclub (by June Duprez), such side dishes of menace as a suspect gentleman in a turban, and some reasonably exciting mayhem in a pitch dark hangar. Gradually the investigators realize that they have unwittingly been flying the Hump for a gang of jewel thieves who will stop at nothing--not even the picture's denouement.

Alan Ladd handles both girls and perils with his customary cold, efficient grace; Gail Russell is very easy to look at; and William Bendix, as usual, is a benefit to the show--though he is given nothing much to set his teeth in. Well-mounted, well-played, well-tailored in every way, the picture even suggests that it might be taking place in some such city as Calcutta. Yet it will be impossible for a melodramaddict to feel that he hasn't already been there a hundred times.

The Other Love (Enterprise; United Artists) bounces a few echoes--but very faint ones--off Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. Its heroine (Barbara Stanwyck), a great pianist exhausted by her trade, comes to a Swiss sanitarium for a rest. Her doctor (David Niven) decides not to tell her that she is far gone in tuberculosis. Slowly, she realizes that he is lying to her. Then she begins to doubt that his lavish charm and his protestations of love are better than so much calculated therapeutic blarney.

Made desperate by the death of a fellow inmate (Joan Lorring), Barbara runs away with an automobile racer (Richard Conte), whom she has met by highly unlikely chance. With him, she gambles at Monte Carlo, endangers her health iu speedboats and, presumably, lives in sin. She also coughs & coughs, ever more painfully. At length she returns to the sanitarium, her doctor sweetheart, and a sorrowful end.

The Other Love is based on a story by Erich Maria Remarque. It has been brought to the screen with considerable polish and uncommon gravity. As played by all three principals it often looks like a drama about grownup, believable people who are not going to pretend to be less than that for the sake of censors or general public. Once in a while it is even possible to discern, dimly, the emotional contours of what might have been a very moving romance about love, anguish and death.

Those who worked on The Other Love must be credited for giving much of the film an air of civilized reality; for once, an extraneous auto race is mentioned but not shown; for once, some of the music played by the Great Musician is not tiresomely familiar. Yet, taken as a whole, the film is a saddening waste of sincerity. There is a kind of strain and protraction and empty-heartedness endemic to the basic story, so that a promising romantic theme emerges on about the level of a carefully concocted gloss-paper serial, garnished with shallow profundities about "time."

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