The New Pictures

Lease of Life (Michael Balcon; I.F.E.) nearly puts its audience to sleep before shocking it awake with the chilling reminder that, in the midst of life, man is in death. Robert Donat is the grey, ineffectual vicar of a tiny parish in rural Yorkshire. His daily round is a dreary mixture of habit and frustrations. Carefully nurtured by his tweedy wife (Kay Walsh), pampered by his genteelly hoydenish daughter (Adrienne Corri), he has only one major problem: how to find enough money to pay for Adrienne's musical education in London.

While preparing one of his typically dull sermons to be delivered to the student body of a nearby public school, Donat suffers a heart attack. Concealing his illness from his family, he visits a specialist and learns that he has no more than a year to live. At this point, the direction of Charles Frend comes amazingly alive. The doomed man goes to the cathedral to pray, and in a magic moment, life seems unbearably precious to him, heady in its color and configuration and line, jeweled with sunsets and enriched by the warmth of common humanity.

Finding each passing minute inexpressibly sweet, Donat lives with--for him--a reckless bravado. Mounting the pulpit for his sermon to the students, he tears up his prepared notes and launches into a compelling hosanna to the joys of living dangerously, accepting all manner of challenges and temptations, throwing off the winding sheets of conformity. The boys love it, of course, but the church elders are shocked.

Unfortunately, this high moment is all the film has, and the picture dwindles away in a continued restating of its central idea. But Actor Donat (Goodbye, Mr. Chips), in his first movie in four years, scores a minor triumph, and his evocation of an inner glory breaking through a life-beaten man lifts an average movie into a near masterpiece.

The Bottom of the Bottle (20th Century-Fox) makes a fairly engrossing picture until it tries to tell moviegoers what it is all about. Joseph Gotten is a prosperous rancher-lawyer who lives in a CinemaScope valley deep in the heart of Arizona. One stormy evening, driving home from his weekly visit to a Mexican brothel, he gets his car across a flood-swollen river just before it becomes impassable. When he pulls into his garage he finds it already occupied by his brother, Van Johnson, who has broken out of prison back East and is trying to make it across the border to join his destitute wife and children.

The brothers snarl their dislike of each other, but for propriety's sake, Gotten agrees to let Van stick around in disguise until the river subsides. But now the emotional tides begin rising. Cotten's wife (Ruth Roman), who has been moping because she can't have a baby, and therefore--by Hollywood logic--is losing her husband to the light senoritas across the border, begins to get curious about Van. So do the fast-living neighbors. All this prying, and Cotten's refusal to send money to Van's family, make Van unreasonable. He knocks out his brother, insults his neighbors, and goes on a prolonged bender, heading at last into the hills with a revolver in one hand and two bottles in the other.

As a posse and bloodhounds set out after Van, Gotten has a change of heart and a bad attack of delayed brotherly love. Having, apparently, a keener nose than any bloodhound, he goes directly to Van's hideout. They indulge in some unnecessarily foolish heroics by crossing and recrossing the raging river, and the film ends with Gotten in his wife's arms and Van going cheerfully back to prison to serve out his term.

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