The New Pictures

The Night My Number Came Up

(Rank; Continental). One night in Shanghai after the war, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard of the Royal New Zealand Air Force overheard a conversation at a party. "Wasn't this party to welcome Air Marshal Goddard?" a voice behind him asked. "It certainly was," said another. "Why?" The first voice replied: "He's dead! Died last night in a crash." The air marshal turned. There was apology and explanation--"I had a dream last night. It seemed so true." The dream was described; the air marshal laughed and thought no more about it, until--At this point in The Night My Number Came Up, a singularly unnerving picture based on a peculiar incident that actually happened in the Far East, the moviegoer suddenly feels like a man who has reached for his walking stick and grasped instead the tail of a tiger. He dare not let go, but oh, how he hates to hang on!

The dream begins to come true. The plane in the dream was a Dakota; the air marshal (Michael Redgrave) is assigned a Dakota (DC-3) for his trip to Tokyo next day. In the dream a high official, a civil servant and a young woman were also killed in the crash; in the actual flight the local governor calls to ask if there is room on the air marshal's plane for Lord Wainwright (Ralph Truman), a colonial officer (Alexander Knox) and his secretary (Sheila Sim). The fatal conditions are completed when "a coarse, flashy man" (George Rose) wangles passage, the radio conks out, the pilot (Nigel Stock) gets lost in a snowstorm over Japan.

The idea of destiny as predestiny is an old psychological trump, but it still takes tricks, particularly when played by a master, in this case Director Leslie Norman, who produced The Cruel Sea. He manages to set the mood exactly--and somehow he keeps the audience from going claustrophobic in the cramped Dakota cabin. Best of all is the picture's sense--a very British sense--of straight-faced tease.

Michael Redgrave as the air marshal is just the right mixture of phlegm and haw, and Ralph Truman as the peer is a jowly good fellow. Just right is George Rose, the commercial vulgarian who cons the better man down and then crows most abominably about it.

The Prisoner (B & D Film; Columbia). "Try to remember that any confession I may be said to make will be a lie, or the result of human weakness." With these last words to his spiritual principality, the cardinal (Alec Guinness) submits to arrest by the secret police. He is charged with treason and remanded for interrogation to a brilliant political fanatic, a doctor (Jack Hawkins) with whom he had worked in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War

II. "You are a national monument," the doctor tells him. "That monument must be ... defaced." The method: "I intend to find his weakness and use it to destroy him." In a word: brainwash.

The duel begins. The interrogator goes over the cardinal's past with a mind magnetized to attract every particle of experience that carries a negative charge. "I am proud," the cardinal smilingly confesses. "All my life [I have] shirked nothing, ducked nothing, overcome everything." All day no rest, all night no sleep. One day an old woman is wheeled into the interrogation chamber on a stretcher: it is his mother. She will be sent to the research hospital, the doctor says, unless there is a confession. The exhausted cardinal breaks down, recovers, refuses. "I do not love my mother," he confesses bitterly. "I never have."

It is the hole in the dike. The doctor enlarges it, brings the churchman at last to confess crimes he has never committed in order to punish himself for the sins he is truly guilty of. Too late the exhausted cardinal realizes his mistake: a man may not judge himself any more than he may judge another. Defaced, the living monument is set free, "to walk the world like Cain." He goes to meet his fate, far worse than death to his human pride, with a simple courage that leaves the interrogator shaken. "It means," the doctor says wonderingly, "you've defeated me."

The speech, like most of the important ones in this clever melodrama, does not quite carry the intended conviction. The trouble seems to be that Bridget Boland, who wrote the script as well as the play (a hit in London) on which it is based, has perhaps not thought long enough about what makes people weak or strong, bad or good, split or whole. The interrogator in the picture has the resources of the state at his command. At no point, however, does the cardinal seem to get any help from the spiritual realm--indeed, there is little evidence that he seriously asks for God's help, or tries with any genuine religious understanding to commend his spirit into God's hands. He just goes it alone like a self-sufficient 19th century liberal, or at best like a sort of Kafka in scarlet--both of which are improbable states of soul in a dedicated clergyman of any faith.

Moreover, the failure of religious sensibility is involved with a painful lapse of taste. The protagonist of the piece is not just any clergyman, but is plainly modeled on Hungary's Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty. In passing its judgment on the imaginary cardinal, the film implies a judgment--before all the facts are in--on the real one. The moviegoer is thus left with the highly unpleasant sensation that somebody is turning a fast buck on the cardinal's misfortunes.

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