The New Picture

Saturday's Children (Warner). In the bouncing days of bedroom farce, Maxwell Anderson's comedy, Saturday's Children, pried the lid off social consciousness with an entering wedge of humor. Thirteen years later, having found that social consciousness pays, Hollywood was sure to set Saturday's Children working for its living in the movies.

In general Saturday's Children is about a family of drab but amiable nitwits, the Halevys, who exist in a railroad flat on the wrong side of Manhattan's subway tracks. In particular it is about the underprivileged romance of pretty Bobby Halevy (Anne Shirley) and Rims Rosson (John Garfield), a shy, lovable, half-educated, half-awake johnny who invents gadgets that never work, dreams of going to Manila to try to turn hemp into silk. Father Halevy (Claude Rains), a bookkeeper, has spent a lifetime working himself into an insecure rut at a mail-order house. Mother Halevy (Elizabeth Risdon), a cinemaddict, has spent a lifetime knitting her husband a sweater, but has never finished it. There is also cheap, dissatisfied Florrie Halevy (Lee Patrick), who henpecks her bill-collector husband (Roscoe Karns).

Florrie is the villainess of the comedy. She shows Sister Bobby how to trick Rims into marriage just before he is starting for Manila. At first the Rims Rossons live happily in their $22.50 flat over a garage. Then Bobby loses her job, Rims takes a cut, the bills pile up, the quarrels begin. Soon romance is as far behind as the rent. So Rims leaves Bobby.

Act III of the play straightened out this artful tangle in the only way to avoid sentimentality or unpremeditated farce--Rims crawled back through his wife's bedroom window. Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein's otherwise brilliant script would have done well to follow the play. Instead it sends Father Halevy into unsuitable heroics, makes Rims flex his moral muscle, resolve to fight on to victory because his wife is going to have a baby.

But it would take more than this false-note ending to spoil a picture which has in its background Dennie Moore as a gossipy, husband-hunting, goo-goo-eyed mail-order clerk. Cinemactress Moore is mistress of fluttery, nasal, dime-store Manhattanese. It is worth sitting twice through the picture to see her exhibition of modesty conquering candor as she twitters: "I'm going to the washroom--pardon my frankness."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.