CINEMA
With a Song in My Heart. (Odeon, Marble Arch.)—So Little Time. (Rialto.)—On Moonlight Bay. (Warner.) ONE of the most curious of American phenomena is the way in which living persons are commemorated on the screen. With a Song in My Heart eulogises the life and hard times of Miss Jane Froman, a torch singer who, in the war, smashed her leg in a plane accident and, with the aid of iron props and an iron will, rose to sing more torch songs. Carried on and off stages and on and off continents, she gallantly pursued her vocation of entertaining the troops. Miss Froman 's part in this film is played by the lovely Miss Susan Hayward, whose arduous job it is to mouth the songs which Miss Froman is vocalising elsewhere. To dance, look beautiful and ventriloquise at the same time is no mean feat, and Miss Hayward carries off the triple crown with honours.
Destined to be embarrassingly sentimental—plucky little trouper and homesick G.I. being a particularly cloying mixture—the picture succeeds in being quite otherwise ; charming, unpretentious and extremely touching. Miss Froman has a most attractive voice, old- fashioned inasmuch as it places no onus whatever upon the nose ; and the songs she sings wring the heart with memories. Miss Thelma Ritter, as all the toughies-with-hearts-of-gold rolled into one, brings to her role of a nurse a splendid punch, which is more than can be said for the male members of the cast, Messrs. Rory Calhoun and David Wayne. As the heroine's successive husbands, gentlemen who are doubtless also still alive, they show a becoming and very natural reluctance to be anything but shadows. Directed by Mr. Walter Lang, the film cleaves through the corn and sugar with delicate precision, leaving in its wake, nevertheless, trails of sodden handker- chiefs.
With -the passing of years it is now permissible to let Germans have hearts ; to love and be loved regardless of their bad references. In So Little Time, which is the story of the love of a young Belgian girl and a German officer quartered in her mother's chateau near Brussels, there is, however, little proof that the Prussian heart is willing to part with its corsets in public. Mr. Marius Goring is so very much the jackbooted autocrat, the poker up his spine extending to his face, that it is hard to see why Miss Maria Schell, at first resentful and full of hatred, should come to change her mind. A lot of duet-playing on the piano, it is true, promotes the right atmos- phere, but even this is condensed into a chill air by Mr. Goring's governessy instructions about the proper expression.
As a secondary theme to the lovers' morose concerto, from which grace notes and glissandos have been rigorously purged, there is the Resistance movement. Miss Schell, torn in two by patriotism and passion, gives a fine performance, but for the watcher the problem is of purely academic interest. Had Mr. Goring been permitted to radiate even so much as a candle's worth of warmth, or bent so much as a millimetre from the rigidly vertical, one could have shared in the anguish. But this proud Prussian, though ostensibly concealing beneath his field-grey a set of human emotions, conceals them too well and for too long. The film is directed by Mr. Compton Bennett, slowly, clearly, and without a surprise anywhere.
On Moonlight Bay stars Miss Doris Day and Mr. Gordon MacRae, and it is, supposedly, a story with music as opposed to a" musical." The difference is not strikingly apparent. The stars, playing teen- agers in the throes of first love, sing in their appointed firmament, a small American town in 1916, at every opportunity. At all moments of crisis, such as when Dad, Mr. Leon Ames, separates the juvenile couple, or when Mr. MacRae volunteers for the Army, voices are immediately raised in melodious anguish. Save for an enchantingly pretty snow scene and a little boy called Billy Gray, this simple domestic comedy is nothing out of the ordinary except, of course, that one must always be grateful for the fact that no one wants to get, or nearly gets, or does get into vaudeville. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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