IN American films of the past year there has been a sturdy trend toward a more mature appraisal of personality and behavior in our society. It probably started with the unhoneyed treatment of Citizen Kane’s life. “Kings Row,” for all its indulgences, treated sadism in medicine as well as insanity. “The Moon and Sixpence” showed the clear superiority of a social rebel over the convention-bound lives around him. “The Male Animal” glossed it over, but it was against the Gene Talmadges in the scholastic world and recognized the feelings of an intellectual. “Now, Voyager” considered the mother as the root of a severe neurosis and advocated a kind of psychoanalysis. This brave new movie world continues in “Journey for Margaret,” which attempts to show the appalling psychological effects of a war on small children, not as poor little things and sure box-office, but as ill human beings.
The children are seen in a nursery during the height of the German raids in 1940. War correspondent Robert Young comes to get a story, meets the refugee doctor, Fay Bainter, standing probably for Anna Freud, the child psychiatrist. Miss Bainter shows him her roomsful of shocked children: the little girl who screams at the sight of a man, the boy who retreats from the world to his woolly lamb, the girl who constantly jerks her head up and down, Margaret, who has a compulsive gesture of wiping the corners of her eyes and cannot be parted from her “imagesium” bomb. The scene of the little boy, clutching his lamb and saying over and over, meaninglessly, some magic phrases, is pretty subtle for movies. Mr. Young is impressed, and so are you, for the most part. The two central children have some difficult assignments—the writing here is good—and they almost reach the convincing physical and emotional derangement demanded of them, though stealing glances at the director often enough and walking so painstakingly as to keep you jittery. In some of these scenes the camera acts as an interested onlooker and a sustained one; so that you can watch the child’s behavior for long sequences. Margaret O’Brien, a professional seven-year-old, with a dark, oval, fiery face and a wonderful hat like Picasso’s clowns, has a way of blurting her words suddenly and emphatically, like a delayed bomb. The other child, William Severn, is better when he is not just being cuddly.
As a rule, in psychiatric movies, the further the picture gets from the hospital and case histories the worse it is, and “Journey for Margaret” is excruciatingly true to this form. It has a love story about Robert Young and Laraine Day, which is ghostlike in comparison to the children’s home. They and their subplot do strange things the movie doesn’t prepare you sufficiently for. Miss Day has a way of turning on smiles, intoxication or pain so extremely and fast as to leave you behind. The psychology of the husband and wife is all right, except that it is shown as inadequately as a mountain-climb would be by showing the climber at the top of the peak. The writing of their speeches is terrible (“Oh, God! Gimme the strength and wisdom to stay mad!”). That one was so embarrassing for everybody they pityingly turned the light off Young’s face when he said it.
The intentions of this movie are admirable, but it has the unforgivable fault of talking down to the audience. One’s natural response to the bombing, if only for its effect on the children, is substantial enough without the set speeches about Rotterdam. But worse is the tendency to turn aside from the serious effect of the movie with something easily recognizable, perhaps to be laughed at, such as Young’s four chair-squeaking scenes and the Japanese envoy, in fear that you might forget that movies are your best entertainment. It is a good movie only when it is about the children.
January 4, 1943