The Lobster-Supper Charlies

Hollywood, living far beyond its cus tomers' means, suffers from a severely bloated pocketbook (TIME, Oct. 21). The complaint is chronic, but a shrewd new diagnosis has been made by the Saturday Review of Literature's roving reviewer, John Mason Brown.

Critic Brown, who normally spends more time on books and Broadway than at the movies, dropped in to see the British-made Brief Encounter. He liked its lack of glamor:

"The heroine . . . though pretty, is not a traveling salesman's idea of Venus. Hers is an interesting face, not a vacant one. . . . Her hair looks as if she could have brushed and combed it herself, and not as if it were her habit to have a permanent after every cigaret. She gets along . . . nicely . . . without mink coats, a swan bed, a custom-built Cadillac, a costly and always unspotted negligee in which to help her butler do the housework. . . . This willingness to keep its expenses scaled to life's facts rather than its fantasies is ... what distinguishes the entire movie. . . .

"Hollywood seems, however . . . unwilling or unable to learn the lesson that it should have been taught by the better foreign films. It refuses to realize . . . that comparative poverty can be the mother of invention.

"Its executives . . . continue to go their old Lobster-Supper-Charlie way, delighting in the pitiful ostentations of the nouveaux-riches. . . . They can never leave well enough off alone. . . ."

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