The New Pictures

Little Friend (Gaumont-British). That any director could take the threadbare situation of the estranged couple being reunited by love for their small daughter and make adult entertainment out of it seems hard to believe. Yet that is precisely what Director Berthold Viertel contrives to do in Little Friend.

Felicity Hughes (Nova Pilbeam) is a thoughtful, slightly neurotic little girl who senses, without defining, the presence of something appallingly ugly in the relations between her father and mother. She learns enough to perceive that Frank Hilliard, an actor whom her mother admires, is somehow responsible. This knowledge merely makes the situation more puzzling than ever. Her only ally is a cockney confectioner's boy in whose cellar she hides after she has gone to Hilliard's apartment one evening and seen her mother's coat thrown down across a sofa. It is the confectioner's boy who saves her life when, at the end of the picture, after being forced to testify against her mother in a divorce court, she has gone home and turned on the gas-logs in her nursery.

A shade too long, and at times too conscious of its message, Little Friend (the title is an ironic use of the nickname Hilliard gives to Felicity Hughes) is certainly one of the more distinguished British importations of the season. Good shot: Felicity dancing with the confectioner's boy at her birthday party.

When the London Evening Standard ran a contest this autumn to discover a better name for Nova Pilbeam, some of the answers were Beryl Beamstar, Nova Cinemata, June, Dawn, and Marina Pilbeam. She decided to retain her own name, which she considers less whimsical than Myrna Loy or Greta Garbo. Her father is Arnold Pilbeam, for the last 15 years stage manager for the late Sir Nigel Playfair.

Nova is a compliment to her maternal grandmother, who came from Nova Scotia. By far the most famed child actress in England, Nova Pilbeam is by no means a British Shirley Temple. Now 14, small for her age, she made her stage debut at 5, in an amateur children's fantasy, started to act professionally at 12.

Since then she has acquired an adult technique which, with her childish body, her attractively homely face, gives her performances a peculiarly effective quality. For Little Friend her clothes were designed by Schiaparelli. She goes to a private school at Wimbledon, speaks French and German, sews frocks, knits scarves, cooks Swiss rolls, owns a black and white cat, an ivory mouse, a goldfish and a coin with the Lord's prayer engraved on it. Ending a month's visit to the U. S. she last week sailed for England where she will make two pictures a year for the next two years.

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