New Picture

Pit of Loneliness (Arthur Davis] is a sensitive and conscientious movie about life in a girls' school, with muted undertones of Lesbianism. In psychological understanding, it is superior to the famous picture with a similar theme, Madchen in Uniform (1931); and in the use of movie means to complex ends, Directress Jacqueline Audry (Gigi) almost equals, in some passages, the achievement of the great German horror story.

Directress Audry worked with a hard-eyed and knowing script written by her sister, famed French Novelist Colette (who took her story from a 1949 English novel, Olivia, by an anonymous author). The movie tells of a lonely English teenager, Olivia, who is sent to a French finishing school. From the first day, sad little Olivia joins in the twitter of happiness that seems to fill her new world. She is too young to understand the possibilities of evil that are in the air.

The school is run by two beautiful and accomplished women, Mlles. Julie and Cara (Edwige Feuillere and Simone Simon). Julie, the more active, more masculine of the two, cannot resist charming the children given to her charge and trying to win more affection than she has a right to. Desperate for attention herself, the weak Cara subsides into a peevish hypochondria, keeps to her room and lets control of the school pass to Julie.

The young girls, exquisitely suggestible, divide as the pair has divided, some du cote de Mlle. Julie, the others devoted to Mlle. Cara--all innocently, giddily suspended in the nameless tension of the emotional contest. As it fills every room and scene with the breath of girls in the bud, with an air of girlish whispers, forbidden perfume and muffled laughter. Pit of Loneliness falls nothing short of magic.

Olivia herself soon succumbs to the spell of Mlle. Julie. The woman spreads her web for the girl, but even as Olivia is drawn closer, the audience begins to understand how Julie is caught in her own net no less cruelly than her victims are. She is a woman of spirit and of heart, a gifted teacher who desperately fights her own inclinations. The picture is never crass and only once or twice comes close to being explicit.

In the end, Cara dies from an overdose of sedative. Shattered with grief and remorse, Julie leaves the school. Olivia is left to mend her life as best she can. The only serious fault in the picture is its failure to cut the gab at the end and leave the audience to make what it will of the situation. Instead, the last few scenes shift from one foot to another like guests who cannot bear to leave until they have hit on a clever exit line.

The settings are a real wonder--perfect secondhand chateau; and the photography catches them in just that faintly too-dreamy glow in which they are seen by Mlle. Julie's girls. The acting is first rate. In scene after scene, Edwige Feuillere's performance as Julie rings like fine glass. Marie-Claire Olivia as Olivia does very well with a fairly monotonous part, and Simone Simon is real as the spoiled, catlike Cara. but perhaps does not display quite strongly enough the ravages of her moral mange.

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