The New Pictures

The Country Girl (Perlberg-Seaton; Paramount) is the screen version—and a great improvement—of Clifford Odets ambiguous 1950 play about a middle-aged Broadway has-been and the two people who drag him up the comeback trail. It's a tough trail for the audience, too, but the view is well worth the trip.

Oldtime Musicomedy Star Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby) has courted defeat for nearly a decade by mixing self-pity and the bottle. He is, as his wife says, a "cunning drunkard," and he camouflages his self-destructive path with martyrdom on one hand and penitence on the other. His main trouble is that there are two people who believe in him: his wife Georgie (Grace Kelly), who is too strong for her husband and too weak for her own good, and Broadway Director Bernie Dodd (William Holden), who has to fight both Elgins to give Frank a try at the lead in a new play.

Audiences who remember Bing Crosby's competent straight acting in Little Boy Lost (TIME, Oct. 5) are sure to enjoy watching him plunge into some new acting depths in Country Girl. And 50-year-old Bing, who sings a few pretty good songs by Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen, possibly gets his biggest kicks playing the aging actor who has to wear special hair pieces to give him a youthful look for the play-within-the-play.

Actress Kelly, who has achieved some fame as a ladylike beauty, also, gets her pretty teeth into a meaty acting part. She is a fine Georgie as she pads about her fourth-floor walkup, thin-lipped and pale, trying grimly to needle a weak-willed husband back to his self-respect. As the relentless, bullying director, Oscar-winning Actor Holden is as sharp as ever: a first-rate professional.

The Heart of the Matter (Associated Artists) is a failure that is more distinguished than all but a few of the year's most successful films. Based on Graham Greene's 1948 novel, it is certain to outrage anyone who admired the skill and the love with which the novelist threaded his theology through the mazes of a human heart. In the film, the Roman Catholic hero's suicide, the event that phrases the whole question of salvation in a cruel and beautiful paradox, is averted; and the threads of motive and meaning wind up in a thoroughly messy theological tangle.

Nevertheless, right down to their final act of betrayal, the moviemakers are sensitively loyal to most of Greene's transcendent meanings, and catch them, like mysteriously luminous fish, in a well-spread net of images. The result is something less than Greene's brilliant attempt to plumb the nature of pity; but it is at least a cruelly beautiful picture of a man who made a sin of saintliness.

When the story begins, middle-aged Captain Scobie (Trevor Howard) has been a colonial police officer in Sierra Leone, British West Africa, for about 15 years. He is, as his wife says, "a good second man . . . the man who always does the work," but he has a special quality of sympathetic understanding. Furthermore, Scobie's Roman Catholicism is of a very devout and serious kind.