Not by the Book

THERE are certain stories that even Hollywood is reluctant to dress primly in long skirts and send to Will Hays. “Tortilla Flat,” by John Steinbeck, was a tough problem of this sort. Its author is famous and its message is noble and philosophical, but its episodes are entirely about sex and drinking. Three years ago MGM tried to make it but gave up. Now its author is more famous than ever, so this year they finished the job of extracting the philosophy out of Steinbeck’s paisanos by conforming with the episodes but garbling them into something of astounding bad taste. They did it by changing the emphasis. In place of the story of Danny and Pilon who love everything in sight that you can drink or sleep with, a trite business with strong religious overtones was substituted. There is a great deal of praying by Spencer Tracy and Frank Morgan—few scenes have been as tortuous as these. Finally, in a forest, bells toll and everything lights up like a Christmas tree. John Garfield and Spencer Tracy play Danny and Pilon in the hard-boiled tradition of Sergeant Quirt, replete with Brooklyn accent, and whenever Hedy Lamarr opens her mouth the wrong words with the wrong feeling invariably come out. Victor Fleming directs in a kind of dreary conservatism that doesn’t turn up one emotion in eighty minutes.

In keeping with everything else, the film of this movie was dunked in sepia, which means general softening and blurring. After all these years of hankering after the stage the movies are now on the trail of oil painting. They think. The effect in “Tortilla Flat” is oversentimentalization of nature to produce an idyllic sham in the manner of the worst Umbrians. If they want some camera innovations why don’t they go back to that radical, D. W. Griffith?

Joan Fontaine’s eloquent portrayal of an English girl in love is all that you see in Darryl Zanuck’s production of “This Above All,” and considering the pretensions of this movie, her performance isn’t enough. The picture ostensibly sets up a problem (whether it is worth while to fight a war that will merely end in preserving the existing order and the class system in England) and then gets out of all responsibility for resolving it by ducking into a love affair. A one-sided one at that, because the man is the one who has the problem—a personal one, involving his psychological workings as well as his interpretation of facts—and the movie leaves all that out of the character Eric Knight put it into.

Tyrone Power is given things to do like grinding his teeth in his sleep, but he’s never allowed an explanation. His last scene, where he is in the hospital with a smashed head, has its tragedy considerably damaged because he and his girl have previously waked up in separate beds so often you can’t be sure they ever slept together. But “This Above All” is worth seeing because Joan Fontaine is an actress of fine sensibilities for a special kind of aristocratic delicacy, and she achieves a poetic quality good enough to repay you for being otherwise hoodwinked.

June 1, 1942