Cinema
The Gulliver Game
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Babes in Toyland. (Studio One and general release.)— Pocketful of Miracles. (Lon- don Pavilion.) THESE pantomime days there is a choice of two at the cinema, a fairy-tale for child- ren and a fairy-tale for adults. Walt Disney is seasonally around again with Babes in Toyland ('U' certificate). I was lucky to see it in the right atmosphere—surrounded, that is, not by critics but by five- and six-year- olds with lollipops and a running commentary and the sort of heaving, thumping and wriggling that doesn't necessarily preclude rapt attention some of the time.
Some of the time is really the point. The first hour or so is pretty longwinded, with everything at its most, in the worst sense, Disneyish, all smirking 'babes' in those vaguely teutonic, yodelly, Ivor-Novello-chorus costumes and scenery and houses. And then, just when the wriggling gets excessive, things start to happen and it becomes a pantomime, a film that deals with marvels and transformations, but of a sort that only the cinema can manage.
It is the Gulliver game, in fact, the play of relative sizes. There's an invention to make everything toy-size, including people. The villain gets hold of it, and reduces his enemies to six inches, and puts them in a bird-cage, the heroine meanwhile (since he's after her) remaining her everyday size (shades of Brobdingnag: it gets a bit creepy as she gazes lovingly at her minute, perfect Torn). The hero escapes from the bird- cage and leads the toys into battle against the single but enormous and omnipotent villain. 'they march, fire, shoot arrows, beat drums, wave flags with the precise decorum of clockwork. Corks fly from popguns in cotton- wool puffs of smoke. The villain cackles with horrid glee till someone gets hold of the reducing gun and wham! he, is toy-size too. Big sword-fight with the hero follows, Fairbanks stuff, over alphabet blocks; and, with one of those agree- ably spine-chilling yells, agreeable even at six years old, the villain hurtles off a dizzying tower of bricks and boxes. But adults may get the creeps at those robot armies.
Strictly for adults of a sort is a fairy-tale you can spot by its title, Pocketful of Miracles ('A' certificate). The odd thing about it isn't its bad- ness but the fact that, bad as it is, it is made by Frank Capra, that legendary name, and made through and through, produced and directed; and it is tempting to read permanent declen- sions into what, after all, may be just one of those aberratidns that warm-hearted souls are liable to. Capra, champion of the underdog, the simple and the inarticulate, might suddenly—it isn't all that surprising—be carried away into sentimentality by a tale about a tippling old apple-woman and her golden-hearted gangster friends. The surprise is in how far he has gone, how obvious, even how unprofessional it all seems.
The story is perfectly predictable; we've seen it here and there in snippets already. Shelley Winters had a child in a film not so long ago whose godparents were the city beggars, as they are here. And how many times have we watched the pathetic efforts of the social con- man to rustle up enough respectable acquain- tances to fill a ballroom? Here we have all the stories in one, the apple-woman with a child from whom she's kept her real position hidden, the child's sudden arrival with the man she wants to marry, the mother's desperate efforts to keep up the old fiction. Incredibly, the whole story asks us not just to believe but to agree that everything—love, marriage, the daughter's whole future—depends on her future in-laws believing the old woman is a society hostess. Bette Davis plays her with all the stops out—a thing at once awe-inspiring and embarrassing to watch.
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