The New Pictures

The Enchanted Cottage (RKO-Radio) is cinema's second successful production of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's famous play about a fine young man (Robert Young) made ugly by the war, a slavey (Dorothy McGuire) who was born ugly, and a blind musician (Herbert Marshall) who helped instruct them in the vision of the heart. To each other, the young man and the slavey become as beautiful as makeup artists can manage. Helping out with the spiritual atmosphere, there is also a housekeeper named Mrs. Minett (Mildred Natwick) who is gifted with second sight (a high wind makes her feel Pearl Harbor in her bones).

The essence of true love is its unique ability to perceive all that is beautiful in the loved person as he really is. Sir Arthur's attempt to demonstrate this fact by letting the lovers see each other as they really aren't is inevitably misleading as well as mushy. But because the story leaves room for a lot of sincere sentiment and for even more acting-for-acting's sake, the story is also an extremely efficient tear-jerker which can get past the guards of even the wariest. With genteel taste and loving care, RKO has turned it into the best sentimental picture of the season.

The role best calculated to squeeze the sobs is that of the slavey; and talented Dorothy McGuire runs the whole gamut. If she looks even lovelier, at moments, as the slavey's bluntfaced self--rather like Maude Adams, in fact--than as Robert Young's extensive improvement on the original, that is only because a gentle soul shines brighter than anything the Max Factory can contrive. Robert Young, as the disfigured veteran, combines his genuine manliness and sympathy with stylized sentimentality in perfect proportions; and Makeup Artist Maurice Stedman helps him give his uglier moments a pathos at once living and restrained. Herbert Marshall as the blind musician (Mr. Marshall is certainly Hollywood's No. 1 Man Next Door) and Mildred Natwick as the clairvoyant do their hammy tasks well and from the heart, as befits good craftsmen. The one note of viciously painful reality in the production is the moment when Richard Gaines, as the hero's high-class stepfather, who is visiting the pair's enchanted cottage and not liking it one little bit, indecently opens a tea-sandwich and sniffs it for rot.

Molly and Me (20th Century-Fox) is the story of an unemployed English music-hall singer (Gracie Fields), who becomes housekeeper to a wealthy grouch (Monty Woolley), fires his crooked servants, reconciles him with his sensitive son (Roddy McDowall), and comically disposes of his renegade wife (Doris Lloyd), who has returned to make trouble. At picture's end she has him so sweetened up and housebroken that he sits with her in the kitchen late of an evening, singing a pretty, foolish little song which advises you to eat when you're hungry, and sleep when you're tired, but never to stop breathing or you'll be dead.

It is, in fact, the touchingly oldfashioned, negligible sort of silliness you might run across in a secondhand bookstore ; and with just those mild merits it is affectionately, gracefully done. Obviously a follow-up of Holy Matrimony (TIME, Aug. 30, 1943), it is no match for that engaging picture, but it has a quiet, sure charm all its own. This resides partly in the harmonious work of a largely British cast --notably an amiable performance by Reginald Gardiner and a passionate one by Doris Lloyd--but chiefly, and delightfully, in Gracie Fields. In her unpretentious way, Gracie Fields is wonderful. It is impossible to describe how delicately and gallantly and with what redolence of nation, class and character she trolls a nonsense-song, or faces up to Woolley's tongue-in-beard rantings. More than any other woman the movies have displayed, she makes an endearing and happy thing of middle age. She and Monty Woolley team beautifully. But if Miss Fields and Barry Fitzgerald ever got together in a film worthy of them, it is hard to imagine that people would ever tire of going their way.

The Silver Fleet (Archers-P.R.C.), a tidy little melodrama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, co-makers of Colonel Blimp (TIME, April 2), tells the story of a Dutch shipbuilder (Ralph Richardson) who pretends to be a quisling. Trusted only by his country's enemies, he makes two U-boats for the Germans, then engineers the delivery of one to England, and the scuttling of the other, with himself and a full complement of prominent Nazis aboard. Though it is, like many British melodramas, always cinematically literate, the picture is longer on talk than on action; the climactic scuttling is not even shown. But some of the talk is deftly ironic, and Mr. Richardson gives a brilliant performance as the patriot.

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