The New Pictures, Aug. 28, 1950

The Petty Girl (Columbia) is an apocryphal account of how Calendar Artist George Petty awakened to his talent for drawing biologically improbable cheesecake. A freehand farce with some pleasant tunes by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, the movie is just as implausible as Petty girls—and almost as well-turned and diverting.

As Producer-Scripter Nat Perrin tells it, Petty (Robert Cummings) at first scorns his knack for improving on the female anatomy, permits a hoity-toity patroness to set him up in style as a serious painter. Then he meets Joan Caulfield, a shapely college professor with Victorian ideas. During an energetic courtship involving arrest, blackmail and academic disgrace, he melts away her inhibitions, and the Technicolor camera undrapes her hidden talents as a model. She returns the favor by stripping away his artistic pretensions.

Though most of it seems to have been done before, the picture keeps its lines fairly bright and its slapstick (e.g., Cummings caught in a runaway sailboat) deftly timed. The best sequence is a fresh bit of visual comedy: Cummings and a process server stray unwittingly into a quick-change vaudeville act, and are thrust in & out of a series of ridiculous costumes.

In support of Actor Cummings’ expert clowning and Actress Caulfield’s good looks, the film puts Elsa Lanchester and Melville Cooper on their best comic behavior, and adds a living calendar of twelve Petty girls to help make the time pass quickly.

Difficult Years (Lopert), in the best tradition of the Italian postwar movie renaissance, shows the plight of ordinary people trying to survive the impact of overpowering events. Made by Luigi (To Live in Peace) Zampa, the least publicized of Italy’s top three directors,* the film explores the effects of the last ten years of Fascist rule on a simple government clerk and his family in a Sicilian town.

To the middle-aged hero (Umberto Spadaro), Fascism at first is something to suffer in silence and loathe from a distance. Then it closes in until it engulfs him: it forces him to join the party or lose his job; it turns his wife and daughter into prattling Mussolini worshipers; it sends his oldest son (Massimo Girotti) to fight in Ethiopia, Spain, Albania and Russia and claims his two younger sons for the Battle of Sicily.

In the end, Umberto recognizes that his reluctant silence meant consent, and feels the final crushing weight of his own responsibility. By then it is too late even to make his peace with the Allied conquerors. Cynical connivers higher up in the party suddenly emerge as democrats, but small-fry Fascist Spadaro loses the little job that he once joined the party to save.

In some scenes, mostly at the beginning, the movie’s sound track carries an unnecessary commentary written by Playwright Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller and spoken by John Garfield; the best that can be said for it is that it is inoffensive. The picture is also flecked with some technical flaws, e.g., inadequate lighting in some of its authentic settings would be the despair of Hollywood.

But Difficult Years offers a masterly Chaplinesque performance by Actor Spadaro, as the pathetic, sometimes ludicrous hero. And Director Zampa tells his quiet, straightforward story with compassion, humor, biting irony and a firm grasp of character. It is a story full of meaning for a world still under totalitarian clouds.

Edge of Doom (Samuel Goldwyn; RKO Radio) sets out to dramatize Catholic Author Leo Brady’s prizewinning novel about a twisted youth who kills a priest. The book was largely an introspective study of the killer’s complex motives and his painful redemption. On the screen, the story becomes a second-rate melodrama with a wispy religious motif.

Farley Granger plays the young truck driver who is nagged by poverty, a sense of guilt over the death of his pious mother and a confused resentment against his testy old parish priest and the Roman Catholic Church itself. Obsessed with the idea of making up for his mother’s death, he determines that the church must pay for a sumptuous funeral. When the priest balks, the truck driver murders him. Then a younger, understanding priest (Dana Andrews) and a detective (Robert Keith) stand by until the killer gives himself away and collapses into repentance.

Director Mark Robson’s accent on gloom, the script’s blurry counterfeit of the novel’s hero and Actor Granger’s lack of depth and force all combine to produce an effect which is neither dramatic nor provocative, but merely overpoweringly monotonous.

* The others: Roberto (Open City, Paisan) Rossellini and Vittorio (The Bicycle Thief) De Sica.