The New Pictures, Nov. 1, 1948

Macbeth (Mercury Production; Republic), as Actor-Director Orson Welles tells it in this movie, is not quite the great tragedy of a noble man gone wrong; it is more the story of a dead-end kid on the make. Like an energetic small boy tinkering with an alarm clock, Orson breaks down the drama into bits and pieces—and cannot seem to fit it together again. Nonetheless, it is an interesting, unconventional try.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a turbulent melodrama, full of spooky claptrap, but its central figure gives it the dignity of classic tragedy. Welles has kept the claptrap, but his Macbeth is no once-honorable soldier whose muddled aspirations trap him into a crime against himself (the murder of King Duncan, in the play, also destroys the murderer’s ability to live with himself). Orson has robbed the play of tragic impact by substituting a conniving heel who kills as he climbs.

Wonder-Boy Welles has an imaginative way with a camera. His stark and gloomy settings create a fine mood for tragedy. The 11th Century Scotland of this movie is a rough, barbaric country with a castle jutting out of the sharp rock; hard-eyed horsemen gallop like wild west villains across the foggy landscape; the wide palace courtyard is full of mud puddles and pigs. Welles has thus succeeded in surrounding the plot with an atmosphere that makes all the crude violence believable; photographically, this mood is sustained. Dramatically, it is often violated, both by transpositions of text and by some of the performances.

Orson’s fascination with the echoes of his own voice on the sound track (a hangover from Citizen Kane) sometimes makes his Macbeth resemble an unmannerly uproar in a coal mine. The on-again-off-again use of a Scotch burr by some of the actors, including the star, does not help; but the production’s main fault is that Welles and his leading lady (Jeanette Nolan) play their roles, for most of 95 minutes, at the top of their lungs.

In those rare moments when Orson swaps his own resonant roars for the sounder music of Shakespeare (as in the reading of “Tomorrow, and tomorrow . . .”), he is very good indeed. More often, he shares with the rest of his cast a tendency to throw good Shakespeare after bad.

The Three Musketeers (MGM) has more ups & downs than the Berlin airlift. When it keeps to the stratosphere of high-spirited comedy, it is an engaging, exuberant film version of the old Dumas swashbuckler.* When it tries to settle down and take itself seriously, Musketeers hits a few air pockets.

Gene Kelly plays D’Artagnan as an irrepressible, tongue-in-cheek Gascon who is knee-deep in gory swordplay. But his comrades Athos, Porthos and-Aramis are derring-doodlers. Athos (Van Heflin) is a self-pitying alcoholic, grieving over his betrayal by a buxom babe known around the French court as Lady de Winter (Lana Turner). Porthos is just a fortune hunter, and Aramis is ready to forswear the world.

The taming of these once adventurous spirits is mildly depressing to watch. When the plot borders on the dreary, Director George Sidney and Scenarist Robert Ardrey brighten things up with more shots of Dancer Kelly’s graceful gymnastics. Since the musketeers never fight at odds of less than 20 to 1 (against them, of course) they have an uphill job unraveling the intrigues of the Queen of France (Angela Lansbury), the Duke of Buckingham (John Sutton) and the unctuous Richelieu (Vincent Price).

In the end D’Artagnan gives up skewering his enemies to settle down in the country with a seamstress at the court (June Allyson). He might have done well to take along his manservant (Keenan Wynn), whose comic talents occasionally save Musketeers from the doldrums.

The Technicolor is good enough to deserve a special mention.

A Song Is Born (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio) may not be entirely satisfactory to either hep cats or squares. Jazz addicts will want to take the picture home with them, to listen again & again to the jam sessions of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong. To those who are mystified by popular music, these names will add up to much noise and little sense. A Song is designed as a starring vehicle for Danny Kaye, but he is almost drowned out in the blare.

When the plot of A Song* is serving only as a link between jam sessions, it is useful and quietly inoffensive. When it brims over into outlandish muggajuggery about gangsters, a torch singer (Virginia Mayo) and a crew of antiquated musicologists, the yarn gets in the way of the hot licks. The plottiness dooms Kaye to the role of master of ceremonies. He handles his interludes adroitly, but some are overlong. And a hep cat can’t wait.

Station West (RKO Radio) stars Dick Powell as an undercover Army officer. The setting is the Far West, perhaps 70 years ago. Jane Greer is a girl named Charlie who runs the saloon, the mining town itself, and practically everything in the neighborhood. Lieut. Powell suspects that she also runs the bandit gang which has murdered two soldiers who were guarding a gold shipment. In the course of hounding down the culprits for the Government, Dick gets beaten up and held up. In quieter moments, he listens to Burl lves sing, and passes the time of day with Charlie.

Late in the show, there is a good, rousing fire, and in the long run the hero makes one part of the West safe for bullion runners. It is all moderately entertaining formula, done with a slight extra edge of care, humor and understanding—except for Jane Greer.

Miss Greer wears an extensive and luscious assortment of jigsawed gowns, and uses her eyes, mouth and bosom so effectively that it soon becomes clear that she was born too late. Back in the disreputable old days of silent movies, when sex was sex, she would have become a major star very fast. Today, she seems as anachronistic as a Virginia royalist. But it is a pleasure to watch her work.

*At least six U.S. and two French versions of the story have been filmed. One of the first in the U.S. was produced in 1911 in two parts. The most famous was Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s version (United Artists, 1921) with Marguerite de la Motte and Adolphe Menjou.

*Remake of the 1941 Goldwyn production Ball of Fire, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. In the original, a group of scholars writing an encyclopedia learned about slang from Nightclub Queen Stanwyck. In A Song Is Born, the scholars are writing a history of music, fill in the chapter on jazz from “live” studies.