Acting Their Age

At a certain age, many movie actresses retire to television. Others grow old gracefully. And the best way an actress can do that--as two once glamorous screen queens made vividly evident last week--is to act her age.

In The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (Warner), Actress Vivien Leigh, now 48, not only admits her age; she exploits it. Her age and its problems, the problems of a woman young enough to want a man but too old to attract one, are the subject and substance of this picture, an adaptation of the only novel ever published by Playwright Tennessee Williams (TIME, Oct. 30, 1950). It was a rather limp novel, and this is sometimes a rather limp picture, but Actress Leigh comes out of it with laurels refreshed and a new screen career before her.

Karen Stone, as the script almost line for line transcribes the tale, is a famous American actress who, in her middle 405, suddenly finds her career and her marriage interrupted--she closes out of town in an ingenue role, and not long afterward her husband dies. Wealthy and alone, she takes a luxurious flat in Rome and begins, in a quiet, middle-aged way, to live the sweet life, begins to drift. With energy to burn, she soon finds herself wishing that some man would put a match to it; but no man appears.

What to do? In desperation, Mrs. Stone consults an aristocratic procuress, a ludicrous old mascaraed barracuda who calls herself La Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales (Lotte Lenya). The lady provides Mrs. Stone with a handsome young escort called Paolo (Warren Beatty), who has big shoulders and a small title. No fool like an old fool. She falls absurdly in love with the boy, belabors him with costly presents and senescent lust. In the end, of course, he gets tired of it all and runs off with a Hollywood cinemama who offers him more fun, and more money.

Actor Beatty plays the pretty boy for laughs as well as looks--seems as though Shirley MacLaine's little brother may be able to act after all. And Actress Leigh brings grace and dignity to a role that, as written, comes depressingly close to a portrait of the lecher as a middle-aged woman.

In Pocketful of Miracles (United Artists), Director Frank Capra's reglaze of a soggy old (1933) candied apple called Lady for a Day, Bette Davis, 53, finds heavier slogging on the comeback trail. She is cast as Apple Annie, one of those studiously shabby, relentlessly endearing sentimendicants who are patrolling the stretch of Broadway that is running through Damon Runyon's brain.

As Capra tells the teary tale, raggedy Annie has an iron kidney and a golden heart. People think she is selling apples just to make gin money. Little do they know that the burlapidated old bag is (violins can now be heard sobbing on the sound track) An Unwed Mother. Yes, the dear old girl is living on Gordon's and garbage, and sending every lousy nickel to a Spanish convent, where her wide-eyed, ever-loving daughter lives with some kind old nuns who teach her to be a lady and shield her from the awful truth about her birth. Apple Annie? The girl never heard of her. She thinks her mother is the worthy Mrs. E. Worthington Manville, no less.

After a short pause for change of Kleenex, Cupid's arrow spikes Capra's valentine. The daughter, now about 18, announces that she is coming home with the man she wants to marry, a handsome young Spanish grandee whose father (Arthur O'Connell) naturally wants to meet the girl's mother before he approves the match. Whatever will poor old Annie do? She'll go see a gambler named Dave the Dude, that's what, and Dave will blow her to a suite at the Marberry, a butler in the pantry, a Rolls at the door and a brand-new set of Paris threads. And when the daughter runs down the gangplank, who will be waiting at the bottom with open arms? Mrs. E. Worthington Manville, that's who.

The very idea of a senile Cinderella promises a painful cuteness, but in Capra's first version of the film that sort of cuteness was au courant. Now it seems about as necessary as near beer, and what's more, the concoction takes entirely too long (2 hr. 16 min.) to work up a head of fizz. Yet even though Actress Davis, the Duse of the Great Depression, is sadly miscast in a role originally played by May Robson, she handles it like an old pro--even though it involves looking like an old prune.

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