The New Pictures, Feb. 21, 1949

Quartet (Rank; Eagle Lion), British cinema’s talent-studded gift to Somerset Maugham on his 75th birthday, is a neatly packaged film based on four unrelated Maugham short stories. Expertly scripted by R. C. Sherriff (Odd Man Out, This Above All, etc.) and urbanely introduced by Author Maugham himself, it also makes a handsomely mounted gift for moviegoers who don’t insist on all the Hollywood formulas.

Story No. i (The Facts of Life) is a pleasant, inconsequential gag and No. 2 (The Alien Corn) a piece of out & out bathos. But script No. 3 is a solid bite of meatiest Maugham. The Kite is the story of Herbert Sunbury (George Cole), a simple-minded city lad with a possessive mom (Hermione Baddeley) and a small boy’s passion for flying kites on the local commons. But Herbert’s young bride wants him with no kite strings—nor silver cords—attached. When he refuses to cut loose, she kicks him out and plays him a dirty trick. “She smashed me koyte!” mourns Herbert. Back at Mom’s he vengefully refuses to pay his wife’s allotment, prefers instead to do an occasional stint in jail.

Out of this twist on an old theme, Producer Sydney Box (The Seventh Veil) and Director Arthur Crabtree have built a wryly humorous study of lower-middle-class life in a London suburb. The camera moves with a sharp, knowing eye from the vulgar pretensions of tea in the Sunbury parlor to Herbert’s wonderful kite straining and swooping in a fine summer breeze. Though Herbert and his wife are happily reconciled (over a kite string on the commons), the movie never compromises with the silver cord. As Herbert’s mom, Hermione Baddeley gives a viciously distinguished performance.

Quartet ends with The Colonel’s Lady, an exhilarating snifter of Maugham’s best vintage. It describes the troubles of a Blimpish colonel and his mousy, neglected wife whose little volume of passionate love poems suddenly becomes a nationwide bestseller. Cecil Parker and Nora Swinburne are just right in the leading roles, and the camera makes some telling, acidulous comments on club-chair Berties and Mayfair literati.

The Fighting O’Flynn (Fairbanks; Universal-International) allows Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to make good use of a reliable family formula: never enter a room through a door if you can vault through the window, never pick a fight with one man if you can take on a squad. In a cheerfully outrageous tale of a Napoleonic plot to invade Ireland, Fairbanks makes his entrance with tongue in cheek. In the end, he almost swallows it to keep from laughing at his own exaggerated heroics.

None of the cast bothers to play it straight. Apparently happiest in his spoofing is Irish Actor Arthur Shields, who slyly caricatures the screen mannerisms of his more famous brother, Barry Fitzgerald (whose real name is William Shields).

The Fighting O’Flynn is a barefaced whopper, unsullied by any hint of realism, but it is told with whopping good spirits.

Whispering Smith* (Paramount) is a standard horse opera, in Technicolor, full of fights, gunplay, chases, and the wholesome passion of a clean-cut Ladd (Alan) for a Good Woman (Brenda Marshall). The complicating fact is that Brenda is married to Alan’s old friend (Robert Preston). But Preston develops a taste for too much liquor, too many women and two evil companions (Donald Crisp and Frank Faylen).

Since Ladd is a company policeman in the days when roadbeds were rough and railroading rougher, Preston winds up on the villains’ or losing side. There are some handsomely photographed train wrecks, but except for Frank Faylen’s lynx-eyed portrait of a killer, Whispering Smith is a conventional western in every detail. Its only novelty: Actor Ladd, familiar as a sleekly tough urban type, carrying two guns and looking pretty uncomfortable as they flap around his chaps.

* Based on Frank H. Spearman’s bestselling novel of 1906, which has been filmed twice before (1915 and 1926), provided material for a 1925 movie serial called Whispering Smith Rides.