The New Pictures

Edison the Man (M. G. M.). Villiers de I'Isle-Adam, eccentric French nobleman, spent much of his life on Paris park benches, scribbling on scraps of paper which he filed in his tattered pockets. When one batch of scraps was collated, it turned out to be a fantasy about U. S. Inventor Thomas Alva Edison. In Adam's The Future Eve, "le wizard de Menlo Park" meditates and mourns that his phonograph was invented too late to record the really great sounds of human history --the blaring of the trumpets of Jericho, Memnon's sigh to the dawn and "the superb whisper of Creation itself: Fiat lux!"

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's approach to the Edison legend is somewhat different. Installment No. 1, Young Tom Edison, showed its protagonist (Mickey Rooney) leading the life of an early Christian martyr in Port Huron, Mich. Sufficient time having elapsed since young Mickey Rooney steamed away to glory, leaving behind young Edison's harrowing boyhood, the public mind passes painlessly to Installment No. 2, solid, literal and prosaic, with big budget written over every sequence. It also has sterling, matter-of-fact Spencer Tracy making a brave, respectful effort at verisimilitude by looking a little wild at moments of inspiration, looking a little deaf at other times, characteristically keeping his hands in his pockets.

As Spencer Tracy, Edison beds down thriftily in the basement of a bank for which he soon contrives a stock ticker. He also has a decorous love affair with the future Mrs. Edison (Rita Johnson), invents the phonograph by left-handed chance, the electric light by hard work, battles heroically to secure the street-lighting franchise for Manhattan, signs off with honors at the age of 82.

Edison the Man is a faithful, even reverent attempt to immortalize the Edison story on film. But like most posthumous at tempts to recreate the creative moments of great men -- Beethoven scoring the Seventh Symphony while romping through a thunderstorm, Schubert conceiving the Unfinished Symphony because of heartbreak over a Hungarian minx -- Edison's fine frenzies remain, with the past, unrecapturable.

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