The New Pictures

The Exile (Fairbanks; Universal) is one of those shy wildflowers which occasionally spring up almost unnoticed in the Hollywood hothouse. But because of its forced growth, half the freshness is off the bloom.

The story is a pleasant little fraud. A trumped-up anecdote of King Charles II's gay undernourishment in continental garrets, it is designed chiefly to purvey the Tarzantics of Actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. But The Exile is also Young Doug's first fling as a producer, and he has concealed most of the fraud with both legitimate and handsome cinematic tricks.

The script (which he is said to have written) has a charming, blank-verse hauteur that just possibly may be a bit asinine--but the direction saves the day by insisting on a witty, natural reading. Fairbanks has also inflicted an extreme lilt on the rhythm of the film--a lilt that would be annoying if it were not necessary to keep the lame plot marching along.

The mock-ups of 17th Century garrets, inns and windmills are engagingly naive, and often drafty enough to send a chill through a steam-heated audience. The camera seems to eye everything with a cavalier detachment, and the sepia film gives the illusion that everything is seen through a blear of centuries.

Few cinemaddicts will stand up to cheer these tender graces, but fewer will want to miss those of a Fairbanks find: a 23-year-old, Tahiti-born "Tyrolean blonde" named Paule Croset. Her performance (as a Dutch farm girl) is as clear as a brook, and audiences may well object that the camera does not linger longer on her cool, inviting beauty.

The Lost Moment (Walter Wanger; Universal-International), a puzzling screen version of Henry James's fine novelette, The Aspern Papers, would doubtless--if it had James himself for a critic--be delicately strangled in the ineluctable tendrils of his famous final manner.

It is, and no doubt of it, a memorable thing to have, at one heave of the pick, dug out the entire psychological mosaic of this perfect, almost, book; and no less memorable, in a filmic way, to have-- senza cerimonia, as it were--substituted a pleasant, if rather extended charade. Though the need for the substitution remains obscure.

The Aspern Papers is a most lively tale concerning the adventure of a young publisher who intrudes himself, "on the footing of a lodger," into a dilapidated Venetian palazzo, where lives, with a middle-aged niece, an ancient woman who, ages before, had been mistress of the great poet Jeffrey Aspern, and who is still purported to possess a packet of love letters from him. It is the object of the publisher fellow to possess himself of these billets--an object which eludes him when the middle-aged niece, after her aunt's death, burns the letters because he will not take her with them.

The moviemakers have replaced this love story of tortured velleity with one of more baroque appeal--one scarcely, however, so recognizably Venetian, American, or, to name the spade, anything. Briefly, the movie niece (Susan Hayward) is young, has led a void life caring for the old lady (Agnes Moorehead), has compensated by poring over the poet's letters, has conceived a coy necrophilia for him. By day she is the cold spinster, by night ah! with her kitten and her finch and that sill ver oubliette which holds the letters (sweet counterfeits of passion!), she is indeed a very Mab of love. The publishing fellow (Robert Cummings), sniffing out the letters, blunders into her dream, effects a gentle transfer of her affects to his own living person and, though lose he must the literary remains, yet wins himself the woman of his heart.

The many who have not read The Aspern Papers will find the early reels of the film, in which horror crouches in the umbrageous palace like a beast in the jungle, divertingly atmospheric (though later the conviction abates); but the few who know James well, will--sensing in the film only "the triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the raw" which he so dreaded and adumbrated--not.

The Bishop's Wife (Goldwyn; RKO Radio) wishes she weren't. The bishop (David Niven) spends so much time laboring in the vineyard that there is none left for his own garden. It seems that nothing less than a miracle can salvage his marriage.

Nothing less than an angel, handsomely disguised as Cary Grant, comes to ease the bishop's burdens. The first thing the angel takes off his hands is the bishop's wife (Loretta Young). In vain does the bishop protest her having so many dates with an angel. Matters advance until the angel, feeling all too human about the lady, makes her what seems dangerously like a celestial proposition. This horrifies her, and the angel reluctantly returns to a heaven which,he indicates clearly, is a hell of a place as far as he is concerned.

Adapted from Robert Nathan's 1928 novel, The Bishop's Wife is Sam Goldwyn's and RKO's special Christmas cookie. It is a big, slick production. The only thing it lacks is taste. Some moviegoers may also be distressed by the lack of Christmas spirit in what is apparently the moral of the picture: you can't trust a soul with your wife.

Christmas Eve (Boqeous; United Artists), a less appetizing holiday confection, concerns an eccentric old gotrocks (Ann Harding) and her far-flung adopted sons (George Raft, George Brent, Randolph Scott). They surmount the world, the flesh and the devil to reach her side on Christmas Eve--just in time to save her from the booby hatch for spending $500,000 on 500,000 dead rats. Producer Benedict Bogeaus spent considerably more on this dead rat.

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