The New Pictures

So This Is Love (Warner) is nearly, but not quite, as lively as Grace Moore's autobiography You're Only Human Once, on which it is based. Actress Kathryn Grayson does her best in impersonating the warmhearted lyric soprano who died in a European plane crash in 1947. In the beginning, she is riding on a circus elephant, and, at the end, she is standing on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, taking the 28th curtain call for her debut performance as Mimi. From one Technicolored behemoth to another, it is pretty much the usual sawdust trail of hard work, strewn with just enough tears and bleeding hearts to make the going colorful but not sloshy.

The Cruel Sea (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is the cold, grey North Atlantic, where, during the darkest days of World War II, corvette-escorted British convoys ran the gauntlet of Nazi U-boats to maintain the island's lifeline with the outside world. This fine British movie version of Nicholas Monsarrat's 1951 bestselling novel captures the authentic spume and spray and saltwater tang of its theme. Eric Ambler's screenplay even improves on the original by cutting down a good deal of the rather arid romantic stretches on land and focusing with almost documentary fidelity on the war at sea.'

Concentrating on a handful of seamen in the corvette Compass Rose, the film tells enough of their personal histories to make their conflict with the sea come alive. There is the captain (Jack Hawkins), who is broad, tough and dependable, but also racked by pangs of conscience after he is forced to run down some wounded men from a torpedoed British cargo vessel in order to depth-charge a U-boat. There is "Number One" (Donald Sinden), with his mind on a pretty Wren operations officer. There is a sublieutenant (Denholm Elliott) who is bitter because his actress-wife has been unfaithful to him. There is the petty officer (Bruce Seton), whose widowed sister is killed in a Liverpool air raid just when she has found a new romance.

Some of these vignettes, well-acted by a cast of relative unknowns, are somewhat slickly contrived. But, as Author Monsarrat says in his novel: the heroes of his story are the men, the heroines the ships, and the villain is the cruel sea itself. Director Charles (Scott of the Antarctic) Trend's direction mirrors the sea in all its moods--from violence to treacherous calm. As he spins the story of men and corvettes (those "fiddling, bloody little gash boats"), he fills in his vast seascapes with cumulative detail: watchful, intent faces behind binoculars, scanning the malignant ocean; the radar aerial, circling an invisible horizon; blinding flashes of gunfire at night; the sea, churning with depth charges. There are the harsh sounds of war: shells bursting on deck armor, the asdic set clicking and pinging with echo bearings, the shattering explosions of ammunition ships, the groaning, slamming violence of a small ship fighting a monstrous sea.

Produced by Baling Studios (TIME, April 14, 1952), known for such expert comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit, The Cruel Sea is one of the best films made thus far about World War II.

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