The New Pictures

The Search (MGM) is a kind of picture which Hollywood should be thanked for sponsoring. It was produced in Switzerland and in Occupied Germany, by Lazar (The Last Chance) Wechsler, without benefit of movie marquee names. Its subject--Europe's D.P.s--is alive, urgent and deeply moving.

The suffering of millions of people is beyond comprehension. Wisely, this story focuses on just two individual samples of it--a Czech mother (Metropolitan Soprano Jarmila Novotna*) and her little boy (Ivan Jandl, who was "discovered" in a Prague radio station).

The mother, obsessed with her search for the child that she cannot believe has died, walks the endless, desolate German Autobahnen from D.P. camp to D.P. camp. The child, who has had his power of speech, his very memory torn out of him, is a pure derelict, looking for nobody and nothing beyond the next mouthful of bread.

The boy stages a desperate runaway (the children think they are going to be gassed); the UNRRA officials believe he has drowned.

When a couple of American soldiers (Montgomery Clift, Wendell Corey) pick him up, they have to tame him as if he were a wild animal. Gradually he finds that he can trust them, and begins to learn English--just as nine-year-old Ivan Jandl did to play the part. Watching an officer's wife with her child, the boy begins to realize what a mother is, and what is lacking in his own life. Some of the suspense and coincidence through which the mother and son are finally reunited may seem a little overcalculated, but in postwar Europe fact is often stranger than fiction.

Much about this film is admirably straight and simple. The cast, including a number of nonprofessionals picked up on the spot, is generally restrained and persuasive. The picture's background--the shattered corpse of Germany--is appalling.

Yet in some important respects The Search is a disappointment. Producer Wechsler and Director Fred Zinneman are not, at best, very vigorous or inventive moviemakers. Their subject, enormous almost beyond tragic reach, is frequently reduced to the scale of gracious sentimentality. The moral complexities of the subject are dealt with so shyly that one can scarcely be sure they are consciously dealt with at all.-Despite its lack of real-life vitality (as in Shoeshine The Search may be a popular success. If so, it will help Hollywood find the courage for more such ventures. A studio willing to go the whole hog in daring--i.e., to tackle so powerful a subject, entrust it to strong men with bold ideas, guarding only against artiness and pretension--would be in serious danger of turning out a major movie.

The Miracle of the Bells (RKO Radio), an adaptation of Russell Janney's fragrant bestseller, is a "religious movie" --of a sort. Its box-office gross should be a fair measure of the depths of U.S. pseudo-religious depravity.

On the verge of movie stardom (as Joan of Arc), a mining town proletariette (Valli) dies of overwork and the effects of her impoverished childhood. A publicity genius (Fred Mac Murray), who has long loved her but, with a pressagent's shyness, dared not speak of the matter, takes her body back to the home town for burial. He is angry, and miserable, because the picture for which this unknown gave her life will not be released. He bribes every church in town to ring its bells, without surcease or mercy, for three days & nights, in her memory. The ensuing uproar makes headlines. ,

To help the publicity campaign along, a couple of holy statues in the church where she lies turn, with a mysterious rumble, as if to get a better look at her. The simple folk of the congregation are sure it is a miracle. Their priest (Frank Sinatra) is afraid the floor just sagged, and makes a carefully equivocal statement about the incident. But whether or not the miracle is good enough for Mother Church, it is plenty good enough for Hollywood. Arrangements are made to release the picture right away, the receipts to go into the finest hospital money can buy. Dissolve, slowly, into a happy ending.

Alida Valli, as anybody can see, is a beautiful young woman. She may be a. good actress as well, but she can never prove it in such pictures as this. Frank Sinatra, looking rather flea-bitten as the priest, acts properly humble--or perhaps ashamed. Most of the other performers have handled garbage before and have little if any shame; Lee J. Cobb, a good actor under all circumstances, even manages to make a believable man out of his cinemagnate.

The Archangel Michael, familiarly called Mike throughout the picture, ought to sue.

Sitting Pretty (20th Century-Fox). A suburban Mr. & Mrs. (Robert Young, Maureen O'Hara), harassed by their three small boys, an outsized dog and a dearth of baby sitters, run a Help Wanted ad. Result: one Lynn Belvedere is hired sight unseen. To their dismay, Lynn turns out to be a middle-aged male (Clifton Webb), who coolly describes himself as a genius. He is also a polysyllabic practitioner of yoga, and easily the most versatile handyman since Leonardo da Vinci. Before he is done with solving problems and subjugating parents, he fries the whole community in its own fat.

Sitting Pretty, which owes a war-sized debt to The Man Who Came to Dinner, will probably be the first of a series of similar Clifton Webb farces. Thanks to his chilly relish of his lines, and his generally swishy aplomb, the picture is good for many more smiles than yawns.

The Sign of the Ram (Columbia), a fair-to-middling melodrama about a pathological cripple, stars attractive Susan Peters playing her first part since she was crippled in an accident three years ago. As a scheming, power-mad young stepmother, she has quite a fat role, and deftly conceals its lack of genuine sinew behind her intense acting.

*Whose husband's estate was confiscated by the new Communist-dominated Czech government last fortnight.

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