The New Pictures

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (Selznick; RKO Radio), like the original bestseller by FORTUNE Editor Eric Hodgins, is a sort of rich man's Egg and I: a comedy natural for all big city dwellers who have ever tried to get back to the land the easy way. It all starts off with the woes of Adman Jim Blandings (Gary Grant) & wife (Myrna Loy) as they suffer the beginning of an average day in their Manhattan apartment. Even for a $15,000 income-grouper, the Blandings apartment seems rather spacious (you could encamp a platoon of homeless veterans in the parlor alone); but the closet space is convincingly niggardly, and the bathroom problem is enough to tempt anyone to the wide open spaces.

These deep-city innocents pay a lot too much for a piece of unreal estate in Connecticut--a pleasant-looking, rump-sprung old house which they are wild to patch up and are promptly advised to tear down. They get a lot of belated advice from their lawyer friend (Melvyn Douglas), and they go into a huddle with an architect (Reginald Denny) who is willing to design practically anything--at a price. Before their homing instinct comes to roost at last they have been put through the wringer by practically every type of swindler involved in, or parasitic upon, the building trades. Blandings saves his neglected job by the skin of his teeth; and for a time even his marriage seems to be headed for the rocks.

Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas have a highly experienced way with this sort of comedy, and Director H. C. Potter is so much at home with it that he gets additional laughs out of the predatory rustics and even out of the avid gestures of a steam shovel. Blandings may turn out to be too citified for small-town audiences, and incomprehensible abroad; but among those millions of Americans who have tried to feather a country nest with city greenbacks, it ought to hit the jackpot.

I Remember Mama (RKO Radio), an adaptation of John van Druten's stage hit, turns out much better than most such translations. A deeply domesticated "family" movie, Mama is a leisurely, kitchen-life chronicle of a tribe of Norse-American San Franciscans, in & around 1910. There is much less plot than incident, and the quality of the incidents increases in proportion to their deceptive simplicity.

Mama (Irene Dunne), who is very much the boss in her home, carefully allocates her husband's weekly pay. Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes), who wants to grow up to be a writer, listens enraptured while the family's roomer, a worn-out old actor (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), reads aloud from Dickens and Shakespeare. Mama's painfully timid old-maid sister (Ellen Corby), who wants to marry an equally timid undertaker (Edgar Bergen), seeks Mama's moral support. Little Dagmar is operated on for mastoiditis (by Dr. Rudy Vallee, with a beard).

The bellowing Head of the Family, Uncle Chris (Oscar Homolka), who loves to scare and scandalize all the relatives he dislikes, dies, with a drinker's gasp of satisfaction, after tossing off his last neat drink. Mama, by swapping recipes, wheedles a successful authoress (Florence Bates) into reading Katrin's stories and passing on the secret of literary success (write about what you know); Katrin grows up, to write the stories that tell the whole movie in flashbacks.

A great deal of the credit for Mama belongs to Producer-Director George Stevens. Always one of Hollywood's better directors (Alice Adams, Woman of the Year), he developed while he was away at war, like a few other talented picturemakers (notably William Wyler, John Huston, John Ford). In Mama, his first movie since his return, he felt no timidity about tackling a script that lacked action and a strong plot. He concentrated, with confidence and resourcefulness, on character, mood and abundant detail, and on the continuous invention of satisfying and expressive things to look at.

The picture is not without faults. Often some heavy trick of tearjerking or laugh-getting or some exaggeration in acting or in the story shatters the unusually rich and pleasant moods that Stevens develops. At such moments, the whole business becomes tinny or unbelievable. And although a leisurely pace is often as happily used as in Going My Way, and the picture has the easy, sweet-tempered continuity of a growing crop, there is too little reason why it shouldn't be an hour shorter than its two hours and 17 minutes.

Above everything else, the picture has obviously been made with the lively affection and pleasure which are the life blood of good popular art. The casting is wise and the acting is almost entirely satisfying. Miss Dunne, who has been prone to hurt her serious roles with snobbish or ironic undertones, takes her tongue out of her cheek and gives a performance that is warm, disciplined and unaffected. Homolka is a blend of good actor and bag-of-tricks; but most of the tricks are good, and seem appropriate to his florid role (one trick -- a sudden shifting of his bulk on the deathbed -- is almost magical). Barbara Bel Geddes has little to do except register gentle, clear emotions, but she does it exceedingly well and even manages not to make it monotonous. Rudy Vallee does nicely in his minor role and Edgar Bergen does some funny and touching things with his slightly larger one.

Crisis in Italy (MARCH OF TIME) follows TIME Correspondent Emmet Hughes in a well-conducted tour of Communist activity in Italy. An excellent background for the Italian elections, the film is particularly instructive on the Communists' talent for playing both ends against the middle. (One neat trick: party-run soup kitchens distributing U.S. food.) Bigger sticks in the party's handful of fasces are the despair and near-starvation of the masses ; the ease with which the governing middle-of-the-roaders can be accused of ineptitude and worse ; the ease with which promises can be made by a party which is not faced with the immediate embarrassment of carrying them out; the party's powerful voice in industrial management; its ability to cripple Italian industry overnight. Biggest stick against the Communists : enough food and financial help from the U.S.

All this material is made eloquent on the screen by intelligent cutting of vigorous, incisive camera work. Many of the shots of people and events have the power of cartoons and of political art. One of the most interesting things that emerges, in contrast with every other kind of Italian face, is the Party Face. Whatever its individual peculiarities, this face always gives the illusion of dry, bony, almost inhuman concentration, as if its owners were intent, in a dim light, on threading a needle.

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