The New Pictures

Bright Victory (Universal-International) tries earnestly to picture the struggles of a wounded World War II veteran faced with a life of blindness. In its treatment as well as its subject, the film invites, and suffers from, comparison with last year's The Men, which probed the postwar plight of paraplegic veterans.

The new picture has some solid virtues : an acute performance by Arthur (The Glass Menagerie) Kennedy as the hero, and engrossing documentary-style scenes (actually shot in Valley Forge General Hospital) showing how veterans are taught to get along without sight until they learn to find their way surely through the everyday routine of living.

Producer-Scripter Robert Buckner, working from the 1945 novel, Lights Out, is less successful in dramatizing the story of how the hero finds his way, through a darkness of self-pity and the patronizing pity of others, to inner strength and security. Without the unpretty toughness and raw emotional power of The Men, the film moves slickly on a sentimental journey past soap-opera landmarks. Veteran Kennedy must choose between living supinely on a sinecure provided by his prewar fiancee's wealthy father, or striking out independently with the help of a selfless girl (Peggy Dow) who loves him. The choice, and the plot maneuverings leading up to it, are never in doubt.

Not content with solving the problems of its blind hero so easily, Bright Victory is even more superficial in an over-tricky subplot that as glibly poses and solves the Negro problem. At best an uneven treatment of a touching subject, the movie courts an audience that may have found The Men too disturbingly bitter a pill; some moviegoers undoubtedly will prefer its soothing blend of easy sentiment and honey-smooth solutions.

Marie du Port (Bellon-Foulke International) is a rueful French comedy relating, with De Maupassant relish, the unequal struggle between a middle-aged roue (Jean Gabin) and an innocent young barmaid (Nicole Courcel), who is the young sister of his mistress. While his mistress attends her father's funeral in a Breton fishing village, Gabin idles about the town, casts a speculative eye on a boat which is for sale and on the barmaid who is not. Both boat and barmaid bring him back to tiny Port-au-Bessein, but he is unable to enjoy either: the boat has a quarrelsome ex-owner; the barmaid, a young admirer who despairingly throws himself under the wheels of Cabin's car.

In a strategic withdrawal, Gabin retires to Cherbourg, where he owns a cafe and movie house, but the barmaid and complications follow him. Finally, Gabin packs his mistress off to Paris, gets the despairing young man a job as hairdresser on the Queen Mary and, happily resigned, leads the still-virtuous barmaid to the altar.

Gabin is excellent as the man-about-town who becomes slowly aware that he is sinking into matrimonial quicksand. Nicole Courcel is completely convincing as the triumphant barmaid. Producer-Director Marcel (Children of Paradise) Carne paces the slight story, from one of Simenon's short novels, a little too slowly, but with a neat blending of decorative scenery and indecorous sex.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls (Louis de Rochemont; Columbia) deals with the thorny issue of labor v. management, a subject rarely touched on the U.S. screen. Filmed in New England, Independent Producer de Rochemont's picture tells of an ugly industrial crisis, with a community's survival at stake. Remarkably, spokesmen for both unions and management agree that it is a good picture. It also deserves the approval of moviegoers as absorbing, provocative entertainment.

Like De Rochemont's Lost Boundaries, the new movie dramatizes its issue shrewdly with a plot twist that thrusts a leading character from one side of the fence to the other, filling him with an inner conflict as sharp as the one that seethes around him. In Lost Boundaries, a college student discovered that he and his family, passing as white, were really Negroes. In The Whistle at Eaton Falls, a workingman (Lloyd Bridges) who heads the local union is catapulted into the tough job of bossing a failing manufacturing company.

Boss Bridges soon learns what his predecessor was up against: the company, being undersold everywhere, can meet competition only by putting in new machines and cutting labor costs. Facing the alternative of watching the plant go out of business (and most of Eaton Falls go out of work), he is forced into decisions that the union opposes bitterly.

Though both movies are based on true incidents, The Whistle is as vulnerable as Lost Boundaries to the charge of oversimplifying its complex issue in terms of a highly specialized case, and arriving too patly at a happy ending. But The Whistle gives sympathetic treatment to the problems of both sides, respects both for good faith and argues effectively that in the long pull, labor and management are in the same boat.

A well-researched script and new faces recruited from Broadway and New England combine with on-the-spot shooting to give most of The Whistle the real-life look of all De Rochemont pictures. Supported by Dorothy Gish, in her first movie in five years, and by the stage's Murray Hamilton, James Westerfield and Lenore Lonergan, Hollywood's Actor Bridges gives his best performance so far. --

Louis de Rochemont, 52, is one producer whose pictures bear the trademark of his own style, no matter who writes or directs them. He builds his movies around a hard core of fact, shoots them in actual settings, weights the casts with unknowns, little-knowns and nonprofessionals, so that the stories will look as if they were filmed while they were happening.

De Rochemont developed his widely copied journalistic style in his nine-year stint as pioneer producer of the MARCH OF TIME. He introduced it to fiction films with 1945's The House on 92nd Street, applied it successfully to 1946's 13 Rue Madeleine, 1947's Boomerang! and his first independent feature, 1949's Lost Boundaries. Also to his credit: World War II's Oscar-winning documentary, The Fighting Lady.

The producer, who began his career in his teens with a homemade newsreel camera, has never made a complete movie in Hollywood and has no use for the place. After producing four of his films for 20th Century-Fox, Individualist de Rochemont clashed with Individualist Darryl F. Zanuck, the studio's boss, over publicity and screen credits. He quit, moved over to M-G-M and quit again when the studio wanted him to make Lost Boundaries in its own way, i.e., with fictitious violence and a budget three times as large as the $500,000 he spent making it himself.

De Rochemont lives and works in Portsmouth, N.H., which played Eaton Falls in his latest picture. His production unit is full of young men, e.g., Associate Producer Borden Mace is 31; one of De Rochemont's insistent beliefs is that Hollywood's hardened arteries need young blood. Now in preparation (under a financing-releasing deal with Columbia Pictures that gives De Rochemont firm control of his "moviemaking): Walk East on Beacon, a thriller, based on FBI files, about attempts to steal a top U.S. secret whose existence the public still does not suspect. Last time De Rochemont made that kind of picture, The House on 92nd, Street, the secret, announced during production, turned out to be the atomic bomb.

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