The New Pictures

Deep Waters (20th Century-Fox) is a very mild movie about a lobsterman (Dana Andrews) who loves the sea, a state social worker (Jean Peters) who hates and fears it, and an orphan (Dean Stockwell) in her charge who gets caught in their crossfire. The boy loves the sea as much as Dana does; Dana is glad to take him on as an apprentice and even wants to adopt him; Jean does everything she can to keep him out of the dreadful trade.

The lovers and the child make each other quite a lot of needless trouble before they get their differences settled. Except for a keenly bracing ten minutes of pursuit and rescue in troubled waters, the picture is about as exciting as a plate of boiled haddock. Yet the story's very quietness is rather pleasant. All the outdoor shots were made in Maine, and are much better than average to look at; but for some strange reason the crisp camera work is steeped in sepia so rich that the whole world looks like strong tea. There is competent character acting by Anne Revere, Ed Begley and Cesar Romero.

Summer Holiday (MGM) is a musical version of Ah, Wilderness!, Eugene O'Neill's 15-year-old comedy of smalltown life in the Teddy Roosevelt era. In some respects, it is still fresh, for Director Rouben Mamoulian has attempted to follow on film the pattern he used on the stage with Oklahoma! Instead of unfolding in rigidly separated plot scenes and musical numbers, Summer Holiday was planned as a flowing synthesis of songs and dialogue.*

O'Neill's story is strong enough to stand this treatment. It is a fond backward look at the Millers, who are struggling with big & little family crises during an old-fashioned Fourth of July. Most of the trouble is started by son Richard (Mickey Rooney), a sensitive high-school senior who reads such radical thinkers as Shaw, Wilde and Ibsen. After innocently quoting a few of Swinburne's riper lines in a letter to his best girl, Richard is forbidden to see her again. Heartbroken, he vows to burn himself out in wild debauchery, settles for two sloe-gin fizzes with a local cafe dancer (Marilyn Maxwell).

The picture opens with a long musical sequence which introduces the characters, starts the story rolling and seems to foreshadow much more fun than Summer Holiday ever delivers. After this solid beginning, Mamoulian (or his bosses) lost faith in the idea of telling their story with music. Songs appear infrequently, and when they do (e.g., Stanley Steamer, a sequence about the joys of primitive motoring), the tunes are strident and too tricky for the story's gentle flutterings over adolescent rebellion.

Even so, with better casting Summer Holiday might have turned out to be a pleasant, unusual cinemusical. Walter Huston, Frank Morgan and Agnes Moorehead are just right as the old folks. But the key role is all wrong for Mickey Rooney. Now 27, twice divorced and the father of two, Rooney is still a brilliant if limited performer. But he is no longer Andy Hardy. Playing a bookish kid who recoils from sex in the raw, he gives the impression that he not only knows the meaning of the dirty words on the washroom wall but probably put a few of them there himself.

Escape (20th Century-Fox) is John Galsworthy's cool grey drama about the relative value of life, liberty and honor. Unable to endure his unjust conviction on a manslaughter charge, an intelligent convict (well played by Rex Harrison) breaks jail. During the next few days, risking and nearly losing his life, he learns a lot about the price of such liberty. But even when a pretty girl (Peggy Cummins) tries to persuade him, for the sake of their romantic future, to go back and serve out his short sentence safely, he prefers to take his risks, and pay the price. When he does surrender, it is on pure moral impulse; he cannot bear to see a good priest lie to protect him.

In New York and London, 20 years ago, audiences easily understood and sympathized with this hounded, embittered, anti-social individualist. Times have changed so drastically that today audiences will probably wonder why he ever bothered to break jail ("after all, it was just a three-year sentence . . ."). Unhappily, the old-fashioned man of spirit is scarcely comprehensible, in a time which has persuaded so many millions of people to compromise both liberty and honor for the sake of security--or even survival. Perhaps the hero's hardships will seem mild and his problems relatively academic, and he himself, to many people, rather petulant and childish.

Escape is still interesting as a morality play and as a fairly exciting man hunt. The English backgrounds in & around Dartmoor Penitentiary help and so does a fine all-English supporting cast. Two of the best: William Hartnell, smoothly compassionate and implacable as the Law, and Norman Wooland (the excellent Horatio of Olivier's Hamlet) as troubled Religion.

*Says Mamoulian in the current Theatre Arts magazine: "It is high time for the standard film musicals to be put away in mothballs . . . They have become an anachronistic bore."

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