CINEMA
"Bicycle Thieves." (Curzon.)-- "The Doctor and The Girl." (London Pavilion.)--“Dear Wife." (Carlton.) Bicycle Thieves has every conceivable virtue save one, and that, I think, an important one, the power to touch the heart. I cannot understand why I, at any rate, watched the unfolding of this sorrow- ful little tale without feeling the smallest sensation of pity, for the seeds of compassion are liberally sown and watered with bitter tears. Yet for me they did not flower. Signor de Sica has done a wonderful job inasmuch as he has pursued undeviatingly the path of realism, employing non-professional actors and using genuine exteriors so that one gets a sense of authentic movement and life encircling the main characters, a father and son.
The father, whose livelihood depends on his bicycle, is played by Lamberto Maggiorani and his child by Enzo Staiola. These two, who, when the bicycle is stolen, search for it through the streets of Rome during one long endless day, act with perfect understanding, and their relationship, so subtle, so unexaggerated,. is a masterpiece of observation. The boy, endowed by Nature with a half-serious, half-comic face, is truly magnificent, and 1 know of no explanation as to why his tribulations do not tear one apart. This film has won innumerable awards, each of which it indubitably deserves, but nevertheless I feel, for all its quality, that the lack of emotional appeal is a defect.
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Unfortunately, 1 am allergic to operations, and in The Doctor and the Girl they are legion ; some performed in the correct anti- septic conditions with innumerable hand-washings, rubber gloves, masks, trays and glistening instruments ; others in slum surround- ings with a penknife and the inevitable boiled water. During most of these 1 had my eyes closed, but this did not prevent me from enjoying the film, so I feel inclined to suppose it is a good one.
It concerns, as you may have guessed, a doctor, Mr. 'Glenn Ford, who, being the son of a famous surgeon, Mr. Charles Coburn, is inclined to be snobbish. He is told by his father that the only thing that matters is his career, and that neither the cultivation of a bedside manner nor a display of interest in his patients' human problems will further this. So Mr. Ford is studious but stuck-tip. However, his soul is saved by an impecunious girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Miss Janet Leigh, who marries him and takes him to work in the slums There he learns all about broken hearts as well as broken legs, and when, in the end, he gets a chance to better himself, he refuses to take it, so passionately absorbed is he in Mr Cohen's ulcer and Master Taglioni's cough.
The acting, particularly Mr. Coburn's, is admirable ; the dialogue is exceptionally probable, and if in addition one is interested in benevolent butchery The Doctor and the Girl provides good, though perhaps not holiday, entertainment.
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Dear Wife is a sequel to Dear Ruth, and it is an entertaining, light-hearted picture. With the disastrous enthusiasm of the bobby- soxer, Miss Mona Freeman is now involved in politics, and proceeds on fanatical lines to disrupt her family's life. This isn't hard to do, as both her father, Mr. Edward Arnold, and her brother-in-law, Mr. William Holden, are standing as candidates for the State Senate, while her sister, Miss Joan Caulfield, sec-saws unhappily between the two. Mr. Richard Haydn, the director, has managed to maintain an atmosphere of credibility in a series of not very credible situa- tions, and there are some thoroughly amusing sequences which, though tottering on the brink of farce, somehow succeed in keepin;
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