The New Pictures, May 22, 1944

Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble

(M.G.M.) should please everybody. Cinemaddicts who loathe Andy Hardy and his stereotypical small town family can loathe them more than ever. Cinemaddicts to whom the Hardys are like memories of their youth can continue to cherish them.

The reasons for the colossal popularity of the Hardy Family pictures—which have grossed M.G.M. well above $20,000,000 against an investment of around $4,000,000—will probably not be found in the story of any one picture, certainly not in this one. This time Andy (Mickey Rooney) is on his way to Wainright College —a small-town boy, frantically determined to get started right. On the train he becomes flirtatiously embroiled with no less than three blondes, in plain view of his suave future dean (Herbert Marshall), who cruelly chooses to remain incognito.

One of these blondes (Bonita Granville) presumably arouses the dormant man in young Hardy. The other two, gold-digging twins (the Wilde sisters), arouse the adolescent beast in him. In cutbacks Mother Hardy (Fay Holden) is seen wandering around in her nightgown and Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) gets tonsillitis. Andy finally untangles himself and is last shown imploring Cinemactress Granville to nurse her cold. Meaning: he has grown up.

What gives this film its callow charm? It is based on realism and on the comedy and basic good nature of U.S. character, however sugared and caricatured. Mickey Rooney’s imitation of a boy’s good & bad manners aboard a train is a bit of universal human comedy which Rooney’s broad-axed clowning recklessly highlights. The Andy Hardy pictures are practically the only contemporary screen scratchings into the Comstock lode of U.S. genre comedy. Bad as they are, they are the nearest screen equivalent to Charles Dickens.

Gaslight (M.G.M.) as a lush, lurid transcription of Patrick Hamilton’s stage hit Angel Street (TIME, Dec. 15, 1941)—the story of a Victorian husband who systematically sets to work to drive his lovely young wife insane. Hollywood’s husband is not quite so icily satanic, his wife not excruciatingly demoralized, as in the original. But as acted by Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer and directed by George Cukor, Hollywood’s ace manipulator of emotional actresses and lacy decor (Camille), Gaslight is still a fierce, hair-raising, handsome piece of psychological horror.

Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) is so subtle with his -trustful bride (Ingrid Bergman), his motives are so far beyond anything she could imagine, that she falls an easy victim. Husband Anton has a genius for suggestive psychology. Stage by stage his wife loses her trust in her sanity. When she cannot find a brooch he gave her, it never occurs to her that he may have “lost” it for her. When she cannot recall some trifling matter, it never occurs to her that it may never have happened. When she remembers a certain letter which would give her husband’s game away, she is already so far gone in self-doubt that he easily persuades her that there was no such letter.

Every night, after Anton goes out, the gaslights dim as if gas were being turned on somewhere else in the house. Shuddering in her bedroom, his wife hears noises in the boarded-up attic. But she half-believes that these must be personal delusions until, in the nick of time, a suspicious (and eligible) Scotland Yardsman (Joseph Cotten) makes clear to her that ophidian Mr. Anton has good reasons, murderous and avaricious, to ripen his wife for the madhouse.

To turn this silky swatch of cruelty and suffering into dramatically coherent, steadily intensifying terror takes considerable style in the staging, and gets a lot of it from everyone involved, especially from Cinemactress Bergman. She wears her bustled gowns in a way to set off the flagrantly beautiful interiors of her home. The role’s extremes of neurotic desperation are beyond healthy Miss Bergman, and, wisely, she never attempts the babbling hysteria or shrieking rages that made Judith Evelyn’s performance the sensation of its first season on Broadway. But she brings fine and passionate insight to her gentler breakdown—which she enriches tremendously by.creating deep perspectives into the sort of woman this wife was before she was trapped.

And in playing love scenes Ingrid Bergman has no contemporary equal. She appears not only to know the emotion and how to make it come to life on the screen, but also to realize, as no other screen actress does, that love is made up of kinds of candor, force and delicateness against which, so far, the Hays Office has contrived no adequate nets. There is a breathtaking honeymoon moment, expressed simply in Cinemactress Bergman’s sure, elated walk from her bedside to her husband, which for plenitude and beauty has not been approached since Garbo’s great days.