30 NOVEMBER 1951, Page 13

CINEMA 46 I 'Want You." (Leicester Square.)—" The Light Touch."

(Empire.)—" My Favourite Spy." (Carlton.) I Want You, a fine and strangely affecting film directed by Mr. Mark Robson, who directed that rather finer and more affecting picture The Best Years of Our Lives, illustrates with sad con- cern how harshly disrupted an American family can become nowa- days when one of its members is drafted into the Army. So soon after the sword has been laid aside, the business put on its feet again and the wife and children at last given a proper home, the call comes for the younger men to abandon peaceful ways in order to fight for a freedom they barely feel threatened. It is Mr. Dana Andrews' unhappy duty to refuse to confirm his young brother's, Mr. Farley Granger's, opinion that he is indispensable to his work, and this honest but unpopular gesture generates such friction and misunder- standing in the family that Mr. Andrews can only ease his conscience by rejoining the Army himself.

The acting throughout is of such high quality, Miss Dorothy McGuire, Miss Peggy Dow and Mr. Robert Keith matching with

ease the radiance of the stars beside them, the script by Mr. Irwin Shaw is so restrained and plausible and Mr. Robson's sense of direction so unerring that the heart warms, and finally, in flagrant defiance of reason, cracks. It is perfectly natural to grieve for press-ganged youth, but it is difficult to understand why, when Mr. Andrews leaves, of his own accord, to build an airstrip in Europe, the throat swells with stifled tears. All partings are tragic, of course, but some surely are more tragic than others. Yet, caught up in the sweetness of happy people being gentle with one another in times of sorrow, one finds it easy to visualise an airstrip in Europe as being a sort of living death.

The Light Touch has as its theme the beloved but, though sanctified by centuries of wishful thinking, by no means common occurrence —the reformation of a wicked man by a good woman. The story concerns picture-thieves and the deplorable but admirably skilled fashion by which they dupe art-dealers with fakes. Mr. Stewart Granger, though occasionally an excellent actor, struck me here as being well out of his depths and sinking fast. It was unfair, I think, to give him Mr. George Sanders as a co-connoisseur of Renaissance art, for neither Mr. Granger's physique nor his manner of speaking measures up to one's conception of an aesthete, whereas Mr. Sanders, though in this instance he is absorbed in monetary dealings, has the air of a man who might appreciate the beauty of a picture as well as its cash value.

Mr. Granger's approach to his light-fingered iniquities is pon- derous. He seems too heavy a person altogether, outweighing the script—which is an airy affair written by the director, Mr. Richard Brook—and overshadowing the heroine, Miss Pier Angeli. As a " love team " they are singularly unsuited, in temperament as well as in size. Love dawns on Mr. Granger lethargically, as it would on a very conservative labrador, whereas Miss Angeli, tiny, thin and sad-eyed as a spurned whippet, shivers and burns at its first touch. She is charming and has, as yet, lost none of her young Italian bloom, but one senses perhaps that the English language imposes a stiff barrier to her natural form of expression, and that it is almost as hard for her to climb over it as it is for her to reach Mr. Granger's neck. Mr. Bob Hope, whose latter-day films have been rapidly skidding into yawning chasms, has got himself a far sounder, healthier vehicle in My Favourite Spy. He is, in fact, back to his old form, and as a very unwilling secret service agent in Tangiers shows us once again how royally he can fool when given the chance. With Miss Hedy Lamarr as both counter-spy and counter-attraction the film offers a rich supply of evef brand of humour from the verbal

to the knockabout—I can specially recommend Mr. Hope coursittg 'l through the countryside on the top of a fire-escape ladder—and all fans of the maestro may take heart. The status quo has been