The New Pictures

None But the Lonely Heart (RKO-Radio), a story about the bewilderment, hope and sorrow of people in the slums of London's 1930s, is in many respects a most unusual picture.

It got its start toward celluloid when Matinee Idol Gary Grant, a warm admirer of Novelist Richard Llewellyn's works, told RKO's Executive Producer Charles Koerner that he wanted to play the novel's pimply, adolescent, Cockney hero, Ernie Mott. It got a propitious leg-up when young Producer David Hempstead called in Clifford Odets to do the screen play. It got itself and Hollywood a new and gifted director when Odets took on that job, too. For still more luster, Producer Hempstead--and the script--enticed Ethel Barrymore back into pictures.

By the time the picture was finished, nobody knew what to expect in terms of the box office. (Its first showings, according to Variety, were "modest" to "good" in Los Angeles, "standout" in Washington.) But however the film makes out financially, it is one of the pictures of the year, a feather in the cap of all concerned in its making. In the U.S., major productions have rarely dared to tackle so wholeheartedly so harshly human a subject.

Ernie Mott (Gary Grant), to be sure, is no longer pimpled or puerile, and no longer ends his story in vindictive dedication to petty crime; yet his meaning, as an embattled young man of his century, has been rather clarified than muddied in the movie. He begins as a cocky, kindly, no-count bum, the best motive for whose footlessness is his dislike for "cheating pennies out of poor devils poorer than meself." When he learns that his Ma (Ethel Barrymore) is soon to die of cancer, he stays home for a change, helping her with her fusty second-hand goods shop, fending off the devotions of a gently Bohemian cellist (Jane Wyatt) and, rather against his will, falling harder & harder for Ada (June Duprez), the cash-girl at a clattering little Fun Fair.

But once Ernie stands still enough to see the static pity of London's East End, and to know Ada's battered desire for security, he gets an angry fever for easy money, goes to work for Gangster Jim Mordinoy (George Coulouris). What he sees and learns under Mordinoy is anything but comforting, and where he finally winds up is not in heroics but in police court.

Ernie's big lesson comes, when he learns that Ma, tempted into crookedness through her desire to do handsomely by him, has become a fence for shoplifters. When he last sees her she is dying in a prison hospital.

At the picture's end, abetted by a gentle old prowler (charmingly played by Barry Fitzgerald), Ernie is beginning to see daylight at last. War is soon to engulf him. There, and always he knows now, he will "fight with the man who will fight for a human way of life." Human Beings. On the whole, Writer-Director Odets has kept his sociology as subdued as the warring lights and shadows and off -screen sound effects which he uses so fondly in his first picture.

On the whole, his ideological restraint pays off even better than his atmospheres. His characters are no glib pup pets but urgent, confused human beings, moved by vast forces they understand only in the cruel, simple terms of privation and passion. Odets' sense " of cinema, like his emotions, is sometimes unprofitably florid, but there is hardly a shot and never a scene in the film which does not testify to his boundless desire to crowd the screen with genuine people in their right surroundings.

A solid testimonial is the fact that virtually everyone in the cast, from bit-players to stars, is at his best or beyond it. Gary Grant makes a gallant and winning fight against such natural handicaps as maturity, physique, handsomeness and the conditioned expectations of his audience. June Duprez' subtle, deeply touching Ada is something new in movie heroines. Ethel Barrymore, with her grandeur of presence, her goose-pimpling voice and her magnificent eyes, calmly knocks you flat and forces you to believe everything you see.

In fact, her return to the screen in itself would make None But the Lonely Heart an event. --

Happy Time. When Ethel Barrymore left Hollywood more than a decade ago after working in Rasputin and the Empress, it was clear enough that she would never come back. She had a wholehearted love for the stage and a less than halfhearted interest in pictures; a community which felt quite otherwise had given her rather cavalier treatment; and she had been driven half witless by the eternal twiddling over the eternally unfinished screen play.

Credit for getting her back into pictures, and making her happy once she was there, is due about equally to Messrs. Hempstead, Odets and Grant. First of all, they had the good sense to present her with a finished script, one which was bound to appeal to her ("it read," she recalls with pleasure, "just like a play"). Better still, they presented her with a new kind of Hollywood. Producer Hempstead is a cultivated and charming young man, full of plans and hopes for the sort of films Miss Barrymore respects. Director Odets is from the theater himself, and also knows far better than to get bossy with one of the great veterans of his art. As for Actor Grant ("one of the finest young actors in Hollywood"), he insisted that she take over his dressing room until hers was ready, and was perhaps most instrumental of all the young men in seeing to it that she was treated with the respect due her quality and her long-earned professional right--i.e., like a queen.

Besides that, there was Assistant Director Ned Slott, an ex-prizefighter with whom she spent many hours talking about fights.

In short, as Miss Barrymore says, "I had a very happy time." She even lost her years-old conviction that the screen, compared with the stage, is necessarily child's play.

She has not seen and doesn't intend to see her picture ("I'm not ready to cut my throat yet"). But, remembering it as work-in-progress, she believes that movies can be "just like the stage . . . as subtle, and about things that matter." The intelligence of the general screen audience, she feels sure, is "very much underrated." Just now, beginning a run in the play Embezzled Heaven (TIME, Nov. 13), she is not thinking much about pictures, but she hopes to work in them again--"If," she takes care to say, "it's just like it was before."

Rainbow Island (Paramount) is a Technicolored mythical kingdom somewhere west of Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, inhabited by Dorothy Lamour and sarong, three shipwrecked seamen (Eddie Bracken, Gil Lamb, Barry Sullivan), and assorted natives. It involves: 1) an aquacade sequence--a ritual of "purification" for Miss Lamour; 2) a comedy act involving Eddie Bracken and a very hungry man-eating flower; 3) some amusingly parodistic Oriental music by Roy Webb and a catchy song, The Boogie, Woogie, Boogie Man; 4) enough general ribbing of sarong and tomtom pictures to make a thin but fairly likable piece of musical ridiculousness.

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