The New Pictures

Our Town (United Artists) is Grover's Corners, N. H., population 2,200. It is a basic unit of U. S. life, lost in the continental mass of U. S. farmland.

Our Town is also a poem in play form. Thornton Wilder wrote it in the only poetic idiom which Americans always understand--simple U. S. speech in which emotion supercharges the common forms. He wrote it out of the poetic materials to which Americans always respond--the casual routine of their lives amid the sights, sounds, smells of the American earth. Because Sam Wood, who directed Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and a splendid cast have transferred Our Town, the play, to film without disturbing this basic poetry, Our Town, the picture, is a cinema event.

Frank Craven is Our Town's spokesman. As he stands against a cloud-piled sky, he might be any kind of American, a farmer, an editor, a bookie. He is the village druggist. Like the other villagers, he is dirt-plain, sensible, forthright. Tolerance with him is a form of humor. He never loses his balance in between. Unlike the other villagers, he is articulate. Like most Americans, he prefers to let things and people speak for themselves. He just introduces them.

Two of the people he introduces are Editor Webb and his wife (Guy Kibbee and Beulah Bondi). Two others are Country Doctor Gibbs and his wife (Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter). Much of Our Town is just the record of how during a lifetime these people get up in the morning, live through the day, go to sleep at night.

Their children, George (William Holden) and Emily (Martha Scott) fall in love. They marry.

With the act of childbirth Emily reaches the last life experience known to the villagers. She lives through one more they do not have. In giving birth she nearly dies. As she wavers along the margin of life, Emily comes to the graveyard, sees the village dead, just as they looked in Grover's Corners. They stand in rows, quietly waiting for her. But the tug of Our Town, of life, is too strong. Emily leaves the graveyard, bringing a new life with her. Since there is no further experience for anybody in Our Town or anywhere else to have, the picture ends.

Against the night sky, the backdrop of mountain and village, Frank Craven stands listening to the Albany train whistle. He says it is on time. That is all there is to Our Town, the picture. Our Town, the poem about the American village, has meanings which do not end there. Poet Edgar Lee Masters caught them in five lines of an epitaph in Spoon River:

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

"With malice toward none, with charity

for all. . . "

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

Lillian Russell (20th Century-Fox), Producer Darryl F. Zanuck's semi-annual rummaging in the attic of U. S. culture, nostalgically evokes the howling vulgarities of the gilded era. This time the hourglass figure of Singer Lillian Russell serves as a prop on which to drape a long (two hours) and lavish account of her vocal triumphs and marital monotonies. For reasons which the picture never clears up, Alice Faye is cast as Lillian Russell. Queues of top-hatted gentlemen, roomfuls of roses, $15,000 trinkets sent her anonymously by Diamond Jim Brady fail to dent her indomitable domesticity. When Husband No. 1 (Don Ameche) dies of overwork writing an operetta for her, Singer Russell marries Henry Fonda. He has been waiting in the wings all the while, never gets up courage to ask until the end of the picture. In between are the awkward love makings of hippopotamic Diamond Jim Brady (Edward Arnold), who walks through the part, laughing grossly from time to time in order (cinemaddicts are told) to conceal his broken heart.

Waterloo Bridge (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a drastic reworking of Robert Sherwood's doleful drama about a love episode in Blighty during World War I--keyed up to catch the overtones of World War II, and toned down to meet the objections of censors. Waterloo Bridge is no longer a tale of a shy Canadian soldier who falls in love with a shy London trull. It is the story of a good-looking, upper-class British officer (Robert Taylor) who, during an air raid, conceives an undying passion for a good-looking ballerina (Vivien Leigh). After causing her to lose her job, he has to go off to the war before he can marry her. The young lady turns to prostitution.

Since the resulting tragedy hinges upon the doubtful moral notions of a lively British colonel (C. Aubrey Smith), who is not averse himself to a ballerina on the side, and the dancer's somewhat unstable behaviorism, some people may find it less than tragic.

But Waterloo Bridge has its points. Expensively produced, it successfully continues Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's intensive he-manizing of Robert Taylor. Booted, trench-coated and sporting a dark, hairline mustache (the inspiration of Director Mervyn LeRoy), Cinemactor Taylor is a dashing officer. His continual kissing of Cinemactress Leigh may become a little tiresome to nonparticipants. But one kiss, after which the camera highlights and hangs suspended upon the languid Taylor lips, should go a long way toward rehabilitating Cinemactor Taylon with his fickle feminine fans and re-establishing him as a valuable studio property.

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