The New Pictures

Room for One More (Warner) makes an entertaining, sentimental comedy out of Anna Perrott Rose's 1950 bestseller about the trials and triumphs of foster parenthood as she and her husband experienced them. Playing the big-hearted Roses, Gary Grant and Betsy Drake (who are married in real life but have no children) apply limited funds and unlimited patience to raising two foster problem children, plus three of their own.

Mother Betsy, a soft touch for stray dogs and unwanted children, is always willing to rebalance the family budget to make room for one more. Grant, a city engineer on a fixed income ("And they fixed it good"), is almost as vulnerable, though he colors his generosity with the wry protests of an amiable fall-guy trapped in a family he never made.

The foster children, sullen and bitter beyond their years, would be the undoing of any more conventional home. Jane (Iris Mann), 13, is a rejected, distrustful child of divorced parents. The somewhat younger Jimmy-John (Clifford Tatum Jr.) wears braces for a leg deformity which, in setting him apart from other children, has sent him into a chronic bellicose silence.

Life with the Roses is one crisis after another, e.g., Jane's acid test as a baby sitter when all the formula bottles break, Jimmy-John's grim efforts to ride a bicycle or hike ten miles for a Boy Scout merit badge. Along the line, thanks to the long-suffering Roses, the problem pair finds understanding, love and finally the security that turns them into normal youngsters.

The movie's handling of child behavior, though too glib and sometimes doubtful, is unusually sound for a Hollywood film, fairly free of obvious tearjerking, and shrewdly balanced with comedy. Deft writing and acting freshen even so ancient a running gag as the one about the married couple forever thwarted from going to bed together. As knowing in audience psychology as in child psychology, Room for One More rises above such lapses as treating an Eagle Scout badge-award ceremony with the solemnity of a coronation, or allowing the struggling, hard-pressed Roses to live in a house that is easily worth $35,000.

I Want You (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio) borrows its message as well as its title from a recruiting poster. The picture shows the impact of the Korean War on a movie-typical U.S. middle-class family and concludes tearfully that home ties must yield to the tug of patriotic duty. Producer Sam Goldwyn coats this sternly real subject with a shiny glaze of sentimentality.

The film's contrived script hits its characters with virtually everything that the Korean War can inflict on the home front. In the thick of these blows is Dana Andrews, a World War II veteran and reserve officer, prospering as a contractor. He sees a young employee go off to the army and death in battle. He watches while the draft board takes his brother (Farley Granger) in the midst of a juvenile romance with the daughter (Peggy Dow) of the draft-board chairman.

Then Andrews learns that his old wartime C.O. is back in uniform and needs experienced officers. By that time his sense of duty has had such a workout that he has no trouble persuading his wife (Dorothy McGuire) to keep the home fires bravely burning for their two children while he volunteers for the Army.

The movie has a few good scenes, notably when Andrews' mother (Mildred Dunnock) smashes the World War I trophies of his father (Robert Keith), a professional veteran, and upbraids Keith for his blowhard jingoism and tall tales of wartime heroics. But most of the time, I Want You uses its characters as puppets in an object lesson, moving too dutifully through their paces to command belief.

It's a Big Country (MGM) is an omnibus film, possibly produced on the theory that its eight episodes would make it twice as good as Quartet. They don't. The movie opens with the thumping strains of Stars & Stripes Forever and a title announcing "This is a 'Message' picture. The message is 'Hooray for America!'" That is a pretty fair warning of what follows.

Each episode takes its own rosily superficial view of a different facet of U.S. life. The first two, no more than mildly entertaining, prove the best in the film. One is a brief curtain-raiser about a club-car bore who insists on talking about the wonders of America, only to be squelched at length by a lecture on the immensity of the subject. The other accents the all importance of the individual by showing the distress of a lonely old lady (well played by Ethel Barrymore) on being omitted from the final census report; a friendly newspaper editor (George Murphy) keeps Washington telephones jangling until a census taker shows up to reopen the national roster.

The rest of the film runs to such items as praise of the U.S. Negro, segregated in a sequence of newsreel clips picturing his progress and celebrities; a heavyhanded comic monologue on Texas by Gary Cooper; an elaborately false dialogue between an anti-Semitic mother and a Jewish veteran of the Korean War, who softens her by reading a letter on tolerance from his buddy, her dead son.

One interlude of cloying whimsy shows the consternation of a Hungarian-American who hates Greeks on learning that his daughter has married one of them; the two men finally pool their innate Americanism in a cup of "George Washington" coffee. The closing episode tells of an Italian-American who refuses to buy his young son spectacles for fear of making him a sissy, then relents and even gets a pair himself.

M-G-M Studio Boss Dore Schary, credited with the idea for It's a Big Country, as well as one of its stones, uses the picture to keep a batch of contract players out of idleness: Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, Nancy Davis, Keefe Brasselle, Janet Leigh, Marjorie Main, Keenan Wynn, Lewis Stone, James Whitmore. They all work hard, and like the U.S. itself, will undoubtedly survive this soapbox opera.

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