The New Pictures

The Fight for Life (U. S. Film Service) is scored by famed Composer Louis Gruenberg to the beating of a human heart. Sometimes the heart drums frantically. Sometimes it fades, almost stops. Sometimes there is a loud overbeat, a faint underbeat. The overbeat is a woman's heart in childbirth, strained to capacity by labor. The underbeat is the heart of the child she is struggling to bear. Once, in the picture's first episode, the overbeat stops. It is like a scene of human sacrifice. The cramped body lies on its pallet. The doctors make deft, noiseless movements with their instruments, then stop. They are masked in sterile white; eyes staring at the suddenly dead body.

The Fight for Life is a grueling picture to watch. Possibly women should not see it at all. Pare Lorentz made it from Paul de Kruif's book, The Fight for Life. In The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, Lorentz showed the effects of human waste and abuse on U. S. soil, forest and water resources. In The Fight for Life he shows the human waste caused by eclampsia, infection, hemorrhage--the three great killers of women in childbirth. Because childbirth kills oftenest where poverty is greatest, The Fight for Life was shot in a slum clinic, Chicago's famed Maternity Center. For delivery-room shots every piece of camera apparatus had to be sterilized with Lysol.

Outside shooting was done in & around Chicago. Lorentz kept an old station wagon prowling through the slums, filming tenements, children at play in traffic, people grubbing refuse from garbage dumps behind decaying buildings. Sometimes the camera was tilted from tenement roofs.

For actors Lorentz took Dudley Digges, Myron McCormick, Storrs Haynes, Will Geer, Dorothy Adams, Dorothy Urban, Effie Anderson. He taught them to act as if they were not acting, got them to behave as if they belonged at the clinic. Two of his men studied at the Center to qualify as clinicians. For some of the delivery shots Lorentz used the clinic's pregnant patients. One worked with him for four hours, then went home and had her baby.

The plot of The Fight for Life is simply the daily struggle of doctors to bring slum women and children through childbirth. At the Maternity Center, the Young Interne (Myron McCormick), who assisted at the first fatal delivery, learns to deliver babies successfully. Each delivery presents a fresh problem. Each teaches him something. At the last he is in charge himself. He delivers a baby in a tenement and prepares to go. Suddenly the mother's pulse slows down. Down goes the blood pressure. The Young Doctor, quietly frantic, administers stimulants to keep life alive until he can get a transfusion from the blood bank. In the picture's most harrowing scene, the blood drop by drop saves the woman's life as the flux of life itself is heard in the fading heart beat of Gruenberg's superb score.

The Fight for Life runs for only 30 minutes. Dramatic without ever being theatrical, it makes even such top-notch Hollywood medical pictures as Men in White and Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet seem unreal and stagy. In its realism it sustains the suspense luckily caught a few minutes each year on epic newsreels.

The Fight for Life is above all a studied social indictment. The question the Young Interne raises is: Why go to all this trouble to bring babies into the world alive so that they can multiply slums? By raising this question and deliberately leaving it unanswered, the film dramatizes its makers' belief that as long as slums and the conditions that create slums exist all the efforts of all the doctors are trivial and a little absurd. In this sense, The Fight for Life is a powerful propaganda film. It was made by the U. S. Film Service, a part of the Federal Security Agency, administered by the Office of Education.

Too Many Husbands (Columbia) is an amiable incitement to polyandry, smartly produced by Wesley Ruggles from a scenario by his perpetual scripter, Claude Binyon, who has completely rewritten Somerset Maugham's Enoch Arden comedy into a bedroom farce. Husband No. 1 (Fred MacMurray), a sort of solo Sinbad, is given to lone ocean voyages. Husband No. 2 (Melvyn Douglas), a slave to his publishing business, comforts his friend and business partner's grieving widow by marrying her when Mariner MacMurray is reported lost at sea.

To most of those concerned, Mr. Mac-Murray's unexpected return (with a flowing black beard) is an occasion for embarrassment. But Jean Arthur, the bright, bravely gowned little woman whose married life has consisted so largely of absences that her heart has grown fonder of two husbands than it ever was of one, likes it fine. The hitherto imperturbable butler (Melville Cooper) drops his tray at the breakfast table when Husband No. 1 asserts: "She's our wife." Says the butler apologetically: "I guess I'm a bit old fashioned."

Bouncing Fred MacMurray and sedentary Melvyn Douglas soon find themselves leaping over the living-room furniture to prove their physical desirability. Meantime, Miss Arthur has the time of her married life with two devoted husbands neither of whom will let her out of his sight for fear the other will stake an exclusive claim. Unable to make up her mind which she will retain, she twinbeds them down in the guest room, hopes they will top her divine evening with a nightcap of fisticuffs. Finally the law makes Miss Arthur's decision for her, succeeds like her in deciding nothing at all.

This sort of fluff is perfectly suited to the talents of the players, all of whom, especially Melvyn Douglas, have themselves a high old time. There is little reason why audiences should not emulate them.

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