“Lady in the Dark” is a three-million-dollar enameling job on the Moss Hart musical play in which a woman’s magazine editor (Ginger Rogers) is psychoanalyzed into marrying a younger man (Ray Milland) rather than an older one (Warner Baxter), and into becoming a less mannish female. The story has to come through the kind of technicolor that makes each shot look like the domestic interiors in linoleum ads and through the kind of costuming, interior decorating and make-up that occur most frequently in the higher-priced department stores’ windows. The task of filling his scenes with color seems to have driven the director to filling them with more furniture and clothes of a spectacular nature. Scenes like the ones in the analyst’s office amount to displays of what the well dressed analyst and analyzee should wear, what the one should write with and the other lie on: a special pencil gadget that unhooks from the belt, and a great green-leather monster that curves so you don’t need pillows. Anyway, it is all the people can do to carry around the clothes, and the furniture seems to be sitting in their laps. The spade work of getting color into movies has to be done, of course, but I think the people who see “Lady in the Dark” will be pulling for the kind that will produce a less livid variety of neutral color, more atmosphere and more color affected by the atmosphere.
Underneath the decor, it is mainly a business of hearing the lines, and not being very much affected or convinced by them. Miss Rogers, for instance, seems just as mechanical and hard after her analysis. I thought her choice among the three men was the worst possible one. She chooses the man whom several perceptive players in the show call a heel and a stinker and who uses words like “boss-lady.” The movie has her going to pieces when he is around clowning as an indication of how ill she is, whereas actually it is one of the more intelligent reactions in the picture. However completely the film disregards actual dream imagery in its dream sequences, this can be managed with extreme conviction and emotional power, as was indicated in a good B movie several years back called “Blind Alley.”
“Memphis Belle” is a smart, effective job of filming by photographers of the United States Eighth Air Force, and records the nature of one of the bombing missions over Germany. The twenty-fifth trip by the crew of the flying fortress, Memphis Belle, is used for the added drama that goes with every twenty-fifth mission, the one which, if successful, sends the crew home to be flying instructors. The tip-off on the experimental attitude that put this film together comes possibly a moment before the plane’s take-off, when a glimpse of a chaplain praying with four of the fliers is followed immediately by a shot of a rack of bombs being wheeled across the field to the plane. But despite this imaginative cutting, done principally by William Wyler, the first stark, clear color shots of the English countryside going underneath the plane indicate in their strength the chief attribute of the film. The photography that makes up the flight sequences is exactly chosen for what it shows, and has the added emotional impetus of the best realistic color that I’ve seen in films. It includes startling images like that of the plane rushing up to and through flak, a terrible scene in which the impossibly huge form of a disabled fortress is seen lazily and drunkenly falling to earth, one in which the mushrooming shapes of the first bomb-hits on Wilhelmshaven turn into a great massing and boiling up of smoke. It is much more descriptive of what is seen on the outside of the plane than on the inside, though an extremely canny use of sound and dialogue makes up for some of that.
“Memphis Belle” and “Lady in the Dark” resemble each other only in that they are both color films. The former was made by the rather odd procedure of processing already colored film in technicolor. Without losing the rough actuality of the original film, this added coloring process seems to have been used successfully in clarifying and dramatizing forms, also in composing them. “Lady in the Dark” works along on about the same opulent level that characterizes Hollywood black and white photography of recent times. Its underlying principle seems to be never to trust anything in its native state.
April 10, 1944