The New Pictures

All This and Heaven Too (Warner).

Last week the Brothers Warner released their biggest picture of 1940 with loud protestation that it would rival Gone With the Wind. It picturized Rachel Field's best-selling ventilation of certain Parisian scandals concerning her great-aunt by marriage. This unhappy tale, long locked away among the respectable annals of the New England Field family, was soon devoured by avid U. S. novel readers to the number of 245,000.

From the start, All This and Heaven Too had a better chance to make the movies than a producer's girl friend. Novelist Field's husband, Arthur Pedersen, is a Hollywood literary agent, and in the early summer of 1938 galley proofs of the novel were at all the big movie plants before the ink was dry. As it turned out, the script was the prima donna of the show from start to finish.

Warners' lanky, sleepy-eyed Producer David Lewis started reading galleys at 2 one afternoon, continued for twelve consecutive hours. Next morning he plunged into the Warner barber shop where Hal Wallis was getting his big round head tonsured, raved about the story to Warners' big-time chief. It sounded good to Wallis. It sounded like something for Bette Davis, who always requires careful story selection. Soon Warner Brothers were $52,500 poorer and owned another novel.

By Christmas All This and Heaven Too was a bestseller. Warner hands began to pat Warner shoulders. Warner minds began to be obsessed with the idea that they owned another Gone With the Wind. In its heyday Gone With the Wind had been known among other things as GWTW. Discreetly at first, Warner tongues began to refer to All This and Heaven Too as ATAHT. It was one letter longer. The psychological moment had come to turn the valuable property into a movie.

Since David Lewis had sold Hal Wallis the novel, he looked like the logical producer. Equally inevitable seemed the choice of Casey Robinson, who scripted such Bette Davis successes as Dark Victory and The Old Maid, to turn the 600 crowded Field pages into a workable screen treatment. So Producer Lewis and Scripter Robinson holed up for five days in Phoenix, Ariz., emerged with a 90-page synopsis, which Scripter Robinson expanded into a 225-page script--too long for the most ambitious of photoplays.

Suddenly, by one of those crises that occur hourly in Hollywood, Wallis discovered that he needed a script for Bette Davis at once. Anatole Litvak, already scheduled to produce the next Davis film, was called in. Lewis, Robinson and Litvak trimmed the script to 180 pages. Litvak, who understands the Davis temperament, suggested alterations which would change the heroine from "a woman in love to one with more subtle complicated emotions." But the biggest Litvak contribution was to bring Bette Davis and the Duke de Praslin (Charles Boyer) together as the Duke is dying--something Novelist Field had found unnecessary.

With the script thus carefully prepared, Director Litvak, a notoriously slow worker, was able to whizz along with almost no changes in filming (a Hollywood record), finishing some three weeks ahead of schedule. Whenever two or three reels could be got in a can, the film was rushed to Hal Wallis, who sat with a dictaphone in front of him, spouting such corrections as "Take out the noise when she blows the lamp out"; "Get a new voice for the old man roasting apples"; "See if you haven't another angle where Davis doesn't yank the little boy when she picks him up out of bed."

At last, when the cutting-room floor was knee deep in yards of discarded inspiration, Warner Brothers were ready to expose their biggest picture of 1940 to autopsical critics and a public stunned into advance reverence by the thunder of advance publicity.

The Picture. At first glance All This and Heaven Too seemed to have almost everything that could possibly be crowded into it. It had impressive length (two hours, 20 minutes). It had shrewd, hard bitten Bette Davis to play the love-crossed governess; doe-eyed, dove-voiced Charles Boyer to play her great friend, the Duke de Praslin; hectic, handsome, breast-clutching Barbara O'Neil to play his insanely jealous Duchess. It had three charming, flounce-skirted children to play the Praslin daughters -- Virginia Weidler, June Lockhart, Ann Todd. It had Richard Nichols to play the Duke's pathetic, lovable little son. It had such veteran actors as Walter Hampden, Helen Westley, Fritz Leiber (very sinister as a saintly father confessor). It had decors gorgeous enough to have come straight out of a cinemactor's dream home. Its historical accuracy was as literal, multiplex, unflagging and fatiguing as the iterations of an adding machine. It had Rachel Field's 1840 period plot about the high-minded love of Governess Bette Davis and Charles Boyer which passes into tragedy, prison and ostracism after the thrilling unsolved murder of the Duchess, presumably by the Duke.

Yet somehow something was missing. Perhaps it was the failure of Cinemactress Davis to dramatize her difficult subdued role by much more than occasional popping of eyes and acid drawing down of her lips. Perhaps it was the ambiguous character of the Duke, who was never clearly hero, cruel husband, fond lover or murderer. Perhaps it was just the old difficulty of transferring a novel to film, the necessity (recognized as unfortunate by the producers themselves) of telling the story backwards. None of these faults was fatal in itself, but all contributed to the film's serious defect. Though All This and Heaven Too had practically everything a big picture could have, it lacked one thing no picture big or little can do without--spontaneous life.

Four Sons (20th Century-Fox) attempts to probe the psychology that makes fifth columns possible, by tracing the effects of Naziism on a Sudeten mother and three of her sons before & after Munich. It is not badness, but his own discipline and strength, that draws the second son (Alan Curtis) to the disciplined and brutal Nazis. It is not strength, but muddlement that makes the eldest son (Don Ameche), a loyal Czech, kill his Nazi brother. Their mother (Eugenie Leontovich) suffers, but she never quite understands what it is all about.

Unfortunately for the picture, neither do the makers of Four Sons, who miscast colorless Don Ameche as Son No. 1, sugary Mary Beth Hughes as his Nazified sister-in-law. Result: as drama the picture depends almost entirely on the efforts of Eugenie Leontovich, whose acting, while expert, is in the somewhat military European style (match ten paces to the rear, change gait, march ten paces further, wheel, change expression).

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