The New Pictures

The Actress (MGM) was an expert comedy when Actress Ruth Gordon wrote it for the stage (as Years Ago, it ran for six months in 1947), and it is an expert comedy now that she has rewritten it for the screen. However, it is no more than expertise. Playwright-Actress Gordon is too cool a professional ever to let sentiment interfere with business, which in this instance, when she is writing about her own girlhood, means that a true feeling is never allowed to foul up a good line. Nevertheless, The Actress offers an unusually pleasant evening at the movies.

At center stage is 16-year-old Ruth herself, gracefully if a little lymphatically portrayed by Jean Simmons. All the dear child has in her head is the idea that she, too, can be a famous actress. She has told mother (excellently played by Teresa Wright) all about her ambition, but mother does not dare to tell father--a role in which Spencer Tracy does his most satisfying work of recent years.

Father is a self-stoking, small-town domestic tyrant. "She doesn't know beans with the bags untied," he snorts of a neighbor. He yowls about the grocery bill, growls about the cat hair on the furniture, jabbers like an old sailors' home about his youthful adventures at sea. When daughter hints at braving father with her theatrical ambitions, mother squeaks, "Hush! You know how he threw around those cantaloupes when all I said was I thought they were peaches!"

Father's idea is that daughter should go to the "Boston Physical Culture School" and learn to twirl Indian clubs like Miss Glavey (Mary Wickes), the head of the women's division at his gymnastic society. The scene where father participates in an exhibition of mass calisthenics, and drops his pants in the act, is a hilarious bit of nonsense that is somehow brought off without dropping the mood of the film at the same time. "Goodness," says mother, as father's pants hang about his knees and the spectators roar, "I must remember to fix those."

In the end, of course, daughter beards the lion, and he proves to be a lamb. He gives her his dearest treasure, a telescope, to sell, and sends her off to fame with no further warning than that she should be careful of "people offering girls poisoned candy." In an unpretentious way. the picture is the most charming and essentially laughable of all the modern attempts at describing life with father.

The Titfield Thunderbolt (Rank; Universal-International) will carry railway enthusiasts on a satisfying junket through the past century of British railroading. When nationalization dooms the unprofitable branch line running from rural Titfield to the market town of Mallingford. the indignant citizens of Titfield take over the archaic rolling stock, with the vicar serving as engineer, the village ne'er-do-well as fireman, and a local squire as brakeman. An alcoholic landowner (Stanley Holloway) supplies the necessary money on being promised that the early-morning train will carry a bar-and-buffet car.

The villains in this whimsy are a pair of busline operators who first try to eliminate the line's 50-year-old engine by charging it with a steam roller. Thwarted, they resort to even darker skulduggery by stealing the three-car train at night, derailing and wrecking it. Faced with the loss of their franchise, the embattled citizens raid the town museum, drag out the original 114-year-old Titfield Thunderbolt locomotive and just barely make the required-by-law run to Mallingford. Both actors and plot take a back seat in this film to the charming Technicolor photography of what seems to be an ancient toy railroad running through an equally quaint toy countryside.

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