Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 8, 1951

The Magnificent Yankee (MGM) is an affectionate salute to the late Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the U.S. Supreme Court, but not a very impressive one. Patterning the movie after his own 1946 Broadway play, Scripter Emmet Lavery sentimentalizes Holmes’s life in Washington in the years between T.R. and F.D.R.

The portrait seems to owe less to the Supreme Court’s Holmes than to Life with Father’s Clarence Day. Understandably, the only real conflict in Holmes’s later years, i.e., the clash of legal ideas, hardly lends itself to dramatization. But Lavery skimps even on a primer-level presentation of his subject’s life work. Having emptied the character of all but the vaguest sense of purpose, to say nothing of greatness, he fills it largely with a butter-soft stuffing of homely anecdotes.

“The Great Dissenter” (well played, as on Broadway, by Louis Calhern—see THEATER) emerges a gruff but amiable gaffer, quietly and steadily outsmarted by a devoted wife (Ann Harding), whom he showers with courtly attentions. He loves his country, his profession, the smell of spring and (deep down) the Harvard Law School honor graduates who come each year to serve as his secretaries and “sons-at-law.”

The movie gives Holmes’s law secretaries fictitious names,* introduces Holmes at the age of 61, and accounts for his earlier years by loading the dialogue with the kind of exposition-heavy lines that are never spoken in real life. In its favor, The Magnificent Yankee offers some mildly affecting scenes, a Sunday-best M-G-M production and a spirited, if somewhat theatrical, performance by Actor Calhern.

Stars in My Crown (MGM) nostalgically recalls life in a small Southern town at the turn of the century. Its rambling, episodic story, adapted by Joe David Brown from his own novel, follows the town parson (Joel McCrea) through a typhoid epidemic, a friendly joust with a local skeptic (the late Alan Hale), a feud with a young, unproven doctor (James Mitchell), a brush with the Ku Klux Klan on behalf of a Negro parishioner (Juano Hernandez).

The movie is as corny, and often just as pleasantly mellow, as a fond recollection of barefoot boyhood—which is what it is. The period and locale come alive in fine sets and props; Actor Hernandez and Dean Stockwell (as the parson’s ward) give unusually good performances; the script furnishes some tangy color (e.g., the visit of a brassy medicine show), and Director Jacques Tourneur flavors the corn with the poetic zeal of a French chef.

Out of such wistful images as a lingering shot of two boys on their backs in a haywagon, rolling along in tree-dappled sunlight, Director Tourneur evokes a full-blown atmosphere of carefree rural living. Equally expert when the film bursts into melodrama, he uses only two graphic shots to concentrate all the impact of a burning-cross visitation by the Klan. When the parson later heads off a lynching by an appeal to the mob’s better instincts, the situation is strictly bogus; yet the scene plays with sure effectiveness.

Released several months ago outside New York, Stars in My Crown is now moving cautiously into the big cities, where fans presumably favor sterner stuff. Though short on standard box-office lures (sex, violence, big names), it offers city dwellers the refreshing appeal of a retreat into an unhurried, unworried past.

Tito—New Ally? (MARCH OF TIME) is a crisply informative documentary on the paradox of modern Yugoslavia, at once an avowed Communist state and a potential U.S. partner in the defensive alliance against Communist Russia. The movie traces Marshal Tito’s emergence as the Yugoslav dictator, the causes of his split with Stalin, his current problems in building his country’s agriculture and industry and holding its borders against Soviet satellite neighbors. While documenting Yugoslavia’s totalitarian regime, the film poses the question of further U.S. aid to Tito in the cold strategic light of his 30-odd divisions—Europe’s largest single army west of the Iron Curtain.

To film the first U.S.-produced movie in Yugoslavia since the war, the MARCH OF TIME negotiated for months before Tito gave his consent. MOT’s crew had permission to photograph anything in sight except the army; the Yugoslavs preferred to supply their own military footage. Tito himself agreed to pose at work in his office. A bit shaken when the marshal turned up in a Göring-like uniform, Director Yvonne Oberlin shot some scenes, then tactfully suggested that he might want to change into his working clothes. When Tito flounced out in a huff, Director Oberlin realized that she must have been filming his workaday costume.

* Some of the real names: Francis Biddle, Thomas G. Corcoran, Alger and Donald Hiss.