The New Pictures

The Time of Your Life (United Artists) is William Saroyan's rosy look-in on a San Francisco saloon and, in the late Charles Butterworth's enduring phrase, its habitues and sons-of-habitues.

Most of them are just on hand for the fun of it--a fine dancer (Paul Draper) who wants to be a comic; a lyric poet (Reginald Beane) of the hot piano; a cop (Broderick Crawford) so kind-hearted he wants to hand in his badge; an old Arab (Pedro de Cordoba) with exquisite hands and a diagnosis of the world's ills: "No foundation all down the line." The bartender is Bill Bendix at his gentlest.

The story, such as it is, evolves among five characters: a sort of bush-league saint (James Cagney) who tries to make people happy; a dim Man Friday (Wayne Morris); a B-girl* (Jeanne Cagney) who claims to have been prominent in burlesque; a fine old pathological liar (James Barton) in fringed buckskins; an itinerant sadist (Tom Powers) who has to supply, singlehanded, Saroyan's conception of the power and proportion of evil in this world.

As a play, The Time of Your Life made its author a modest fortune. Whether it will do as much for the Cagney brothers, who turned it into a movie, remains to be seen. It is a skillfully calculated improvisation for live actors on a rigid stage, and has an almost cabaret dependence on flesh-&-blood intimacy with the audience. Wisely, in this case, the screen imitates the stage rather closely. The whole rhythm of entrance & exit, bit and buildup is strictly theatrical, and the camera scarcely ever leaves the redolent barroom set.

The performances--notably those of James Barton, Reginald Beane and James Cagney, are as deft a compromise between stage & screen as you are likely to see. Nevertheless, a good deal which would be as taut and resonant as a drumhead on the stage is relatively dull and slack on the screen. On the other hand, those who made the picture have given it something very rare. It's obvious that they love the play and their work in it, and their affection and enjoyment are highly contagious. They have done so handsomely by Saroyan that in the long run everything depends on how much of Saroyan you can take.

Saroyan is an entertainer of a kind overrated by some people and underrated by others--a very gifted schmalz-artist. In the schmalz-artist strength and weakness are inextricably combined--the deeply, primordially valid, and the falseness of the middle-aged little boy who dives back into the womb for pennies.

The schmalz-artist requires more belief, more wishful thinking on the part of his audience, than better artists would dare require. Reality is as much his deadly enemy as it is the superior artist's most difficult love affair. At his best, Saroyan is a wonderfully sweet-natured, witty and beguiling kind of Christian anarchist, and so apt a lyrical magician that the magic designed for one medium still works in another. At his worst, he is one of the world's ranking contenders for brassy, self-pitying, arty mawkishness, for idealism with an eye to the main chance, for arrogant determination to tell damnably silly lies in the teeth of the truth.

Except in Saroyan's world, barroom philosophers who intrude on new customers with the words "What's the dream?" are seldom answered courteously; and when euphoria enchants any saloon for more than five consecutive minutes, you can expect a quick return of trouble, or boredom, or both. The face on Saroyan's barroom floor has something unassailably good about the eyes. But the smile is that of a swindling parson who is sure his own swindle is for the greater glory of God.

Casbah (Universal-International). "Come with me to the Casbah" has become almost as solid a cliche, in American romantic kidding, as Mae West's "Come up and see me some time" used to be. The Casbah owes its popularity to Detective Ashelbe's tried & true romantic tale about the French super-crook Pepe le Moko (Tony Martin), who just sneers at the cops as long as he keeps to the native quarter of Algiers, but doesn't dare venture outside. It is also the story of a plainclothesman (Peter Lorre) who languidly bides his time; of a native girl (Yvonne de Carlo), weighed down with costume jewelry, who loves Pepe; and of the French tourist Gaby (Marta Toren), atwitter with diamonds, through love of whom Pepe is lured to disaster.

This was good reliable fun when Jean Gabin starred in it (Pepe le Moko, 1937) and when Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr adorned it (Algiers, 1938); it is good fun still. The older versions were slicker moviemaking but took this likable trash more seriously than it is worth. The new version has just about the right easygoing attitude. Peter Lorre can always be counted on. Tony Martin and Yvonne de Carlo, who have never before seemed entirely human, are simple, likable, even believable. Neatest measure of John Berry's sensible directing: the leads don't art it up by calling each other Gah-bee and Peh-peh; they're just plain old Gabby and Peppy.

* A girl paid to talk (and listen) to lonely bar customers, keep them buying drinks.

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