The New Pictures, Oct. 27, 1941

One Foot in Heaven (Warner). They have just put the “old preacher” on the morning local when the Rev. William Spence (Fredric March) and his pretty bride (Martha Scott) arrive to take over their first parish. To the ardent young pastor, brimful of Methodism, the whistle-stop town of Laketon, Iowa (circa 1904) looks ripe for good works. To his comfortably nurtured, loving wife, its rutted streets, clapboard buildings, grass-roots manners seem as meager as her husband’s yearly salary ($385).

Thus do the Brothers Warner introduce their cinema version of Author Hartzell Spence’s biography of his father (One Foot in Heaven). It is a notable adaptation. The lively, humane, very worldly doings of Parson Spence have been transferred to celluloid with intelligence and charm; for the first time Hollywood has created a U.S. pastor with marrow in his bones. Human and humorous, Heaven is a bracing pastor’s-eye-view of the Midwest U.S. of two wars ago.

First lesson the parson’s wife learns is that the parsonage belongs to the ladies of the congregation. She cannot so much as remove a boar’s head from the living-room wall without causing talk. Nor can she wear fine clothes; that would be unseemly, might mortify the good ladies. As her children grow up, their problems multiply hers. Says her teen-age son: “The worst part [of] being a minister’s son [is] it ruins my technique with women.” His sister has the same trouble in reverse.

The pastor himself soon discovers that “poor as church mice” is an apt description. When the family larder is down to non-subsistive proportions, he writes a sermon on the five loaves and two fishes, in the desperate hope that someone in the congregation will be bright enough to take the hint and invite the family to dinner. He visits the marriage-license bureau, hoping to turn an honest wedding fee (generally $2).

No prude, the parson wisely reinterprets the Methodist Discipline to fit changing times. Discovering that his son has been to a movie (forbidden), he takes him to another, to point out what there is in the picture that is bad for him to see. The picture (a 24-year-old William S. Hart film, The Silent Man) so thoroughly wows the pastor that he uses the movie as a text for his Sunday sermon.

Unbelievers who do not see the show may doubt that Heaven’s closing sequence (Pastor Spence playing The Church’s One Foundation on his new church’s new carillon for the hymning townfolk in the street below) has the kick of a Missouri mule. But it has.

Heaven is a happy joining of an honest, gusty book, a corking good script (Casey Robinson), slick production (Robert Lord) and direction (Irving Rapper), with a big and superior cast. It also has the one essential ingredient it had to have: the right man to play Pastor Spence. Backed up by the superbly restrained performance of delicate, big-eyed Martha Scott, Fredric March poses, postures, struts his Shakespearean dignity to his heart’s sweet content. It is a first-rate job—possibly because in many a good minister there is a forgivable touch of theatrics.

Dumbo (Disney; RKO Radio) takes Walt Disney back to the animals. His fifth full-length cartoon movie, profiting from the shortcomings of its predecessors, is notable for its freedom from the puppeteering of Snow White, the savage satire of Pinocchio, the artiness of Fantasia, and the woolgathering of The Reluctant Dragon. Like Three Little Pigs, Dumbo is a catchy fable with a moral.

Dumbo is a taupe-colored, blue-eyed baby elephant whose outsize ears move the prima donna .elephants of his mother’s circus troupe to call him a “butterfly with a trunk.” When he trips on his ears during the elephant act, knocking down a pyramid of elephants and demolishing the Big Top, he is exiled to the circus Siberia: a small part (diving from a burning building into a net) in the clowns’ act.

But Dumbo eventually has his day. Under the personal management of Timothy Q. Mouse, a rough rodent of the Jimmy Durante school and a vigorous new Disney character, Dumbo discovers what his ears are good for—flying. This time he takes off from his window high in the burning building like an angry dive-bomber, turning, banking, looping the loop, and finally machine-gunning the other performers with peanuts sucked into his trunk from the vendor’s cart.

Although Dumbo offers no startling innovations in animated cartooning, it is probably Disney’s best all-round picture to date. Though it lacks the bomb-burst novelty of Snow White, its craftsmanship is far beyond that memorable fairy tale’s. Seldom has Disney articulated his characters so aptly. Dumbo is a most human little fellow, not bright, but willing. His costar, Timothy, is an appealing caricature of a Hollywood agent with a heart. The elephant ladies’ aid society (“Girls! Have I got a trunkful of dirt!”) is artful satire.

Five black crows are to Dumbo what the Seven Dwarfs were to Snow White. Their burlesque song-&-dance routine, hilarious, eminently crowish, is typical of the good circus humor that bubbles through the picture. They have one of the best (When I See an Elephant Fly) of Dumbo’s nine tuneful melodies, none of which compares with the singable Heigh-Ho. One (Look Out for Mr. Stork) has lyrics that are open to smart-alecky interpretation when removed from the picture’s context.

Like story and characters, Dumbo’s coloring is soft and subdued, free from picture-postcard colors and confusing detail—a significant technical advance. But the charm of Dumbo is that it again brings to life that almost human animal kingdom where Walter Elias Disney is king of them all.

Texas (Columbia) is a wild and woolly Western with plenty of gunplay, hard riding, skulduggery, cattle-rustling along the old Chisholm Trail. Its story is the old one about the two unreconstructed buckaroos bang-banging their way through the post-Civil War Southwest looking for work and trouble. One (William Holden) turns bad and dies with his boots on; the other (Glenn Ford) goes straight and wins the heroine (Claire Trevor).

This old plot is given a kind of hearty life by the honest characterization, bright good humor and restrained action that Director George Marshall gives it. No melodramatic toughies, his cowpunchers are happy-go-lucky lads with a natural disrelish to being told they can’t do that.

Texas demonstrates the fact that, after 29 years in Hollywood, leathery, hair-shy George Marshall (Destry Rides Again) has no superior in the business of making Westerns. It is also a prize exhibit of what can be done with the tried-&-true Western formula when its melodrama and cliches are informed by humor and a straight eye.