Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 23, 1956

I’ll Cry Tomorrow (M-G-M). “It is better to light one candle,” somebody said last year in heartfelt testimonial to Lillian Roth’s bestselling autobiography of an alcoholic, “than to curse the darkness.” It may be so. In any case, there is not much sense in lighting a smudge pot. This picture, based on the book, is perhaps not so murky as all that, but it certainly will not brighten the corner where it is.

Lillian Roth (Susan Hay ward) as a stage child was hurried so hard by an ambitious mother (Jo Van Fleet) that she lost her real self on the road to fame. In her teens—already a name on Broadway and in pictures, where she introduced such songs as Sing, You Sinners and If I Could Be with You—Lillian tried at first to find herself in love. David died. One night she went looking for herself in a bottle. Next morning she woke up in a hotel room with a soldier. To make matters worse, they were married. They stayed married until the novelty wore off, and then they just stayed drunk.

In a couple of years, Lillian was drinking because she had to. She even married another alcoholic (Richard Conte). His proposal: “Let’s go on the wagon together.” They didn’t. He beat her when they got drunk, and one day she ran away. Left alone, she skidded fast and hit bottom hard in a San Francisco gutter. Sent back to mother in Manhattan, she tried to kill herself and couldn’t. In the end she walked into a branch office of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was the beginning of a cure and a comeback that has carried Lillian Roth, at 45, into a second career as a nightclub singer.

“This story,” according to the publicity come-on, “was filmed on location . . . inside a woman’s soul!” Director Daniel (Come Back, Little Sheba) Mann, with the help of a sharp script by Helen Deutsch and Jay Richard Kennedy, gets around inside his subject with tact and agility. Susan Hayward plays her part right up to the cork; she can make the audience see not only the horror of the heroine’s life but the rye humor of it, too. Jo Van Fleet is even more accomplished and convincing as the sort of stage mother who rides a child’s life as a witch rides a broom.

A drunk, however, is a drunk, and 117 minutes is a very long time to have one around. The audience has plenty of leisure in which to realize that if there is anything more tedious than a lush, it is apt to be a reformed lush.

The Littlest Outlaw (Walt Disney) is what the trade calls a “wetback,” i.e., a Hollywood picture made in Mexico to save money. The story is all about a little Mexican boy (Andres Velasques) and a big chestnut horse that kiss each other. When the horse is condemned to death by its master (Pedro Armendariz), the little boy steals it and becomes what the title so stickily suggests. He hides the horse successively in a smithy, a barbershop, a ruined hacienda, a boxcar, a church. In transit, the camera takes the usual tourist shots of cactus, fiestas, religious processions, fireworks, cactus. They are all colorful, but the Technicolor looks as if it were printed on the back of an old tortilla.

The Indian Fighter (Bryna; United Artists). “Decline in creative power,” said Historian Oswald (The Decline of the West) Spengler, is “most obvious [in] the taste for the gigantic.” If this dictum is true, the moviegoer of recent years has been seeing the sharp decline of the western. Gone is love’s old sweet story of strong, silent him and dimity her. In its place the studios are offering enormous spectacles on the wide screen—galumphing travesties of the traditional horse opera—in which the lusty heroes now wrestle biddies as well as baddies, and the heroines are as likely to end up in the bushes as in front of a preacher.

The Indian Fighter, first production of an independent company formed by Actor Kirk Douglas, is one of the more successful of Hollywood’s current attempts to sow a wild oater. The picture begins with a closeup shot of a shapely Indian girl (Elsa Martinelli) undressing by the side of a forest stream. After a while a paleface (Kirk Douglas) moseys by, and the two of them engage in some water play. By the time Actor Douglas gets out of the drink, he is really in the Siouxp. Old Red Cloud is attacking the fort.

Dust screens rise before the attacking tribesmen, mobile artillery lobs fireballs at the wooden stockade, and at the climactic moment an improvised land torpedo demolishes a corner of the fort. The siege is superlatively picturesque, and so is almost everything else that Cameraman “Wilfrid Cline has trained his lens on. Some spectators, though, may be mildly startled at the final fade, in which the lovers are back in the water again, drifting sensuously downstream together with nothing on as they laugh derisively at the wagon train that rolls sturdily past them on its way to the coast. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem to be the spirit that won the West.

Naked Sea (RKO Radio). Any simpleton knows how to get tuna out of a can, but it takes a special sort of chucklehead to get it out of the ocean. Anybody who sees this picture, made by Allen H. Miner and Gerald Schnitzer on a West Coast tuna clipper, will soon see why. He will also see a handsome piece of movie journalism, and so many fish that when he describes the catch his wife will hurry to fix him a cup of black coffee.

The film begins as the clipper sets out to sea. First off, the crew must “scoop” for “chum,” i.e., make a haul for anchovetas, to be used for bait. When at last the net makes a full purse, the ship heads for fishing grounds. A few days later, the porpoise shoal and the water birds fluster wildly overhead—the signs of tuna below.

The clipper races in, the chum begins to fly. The high-booted fishermen stand precariously in shallow metal scuppers that hang like balconies over the water, and they wield stout poles from which dangle a short line and a large bare hook. The tuna flash up to take the chum, and many get a hook instead. In hook, out fish, in hook, out fish—the work falls quickly into a pounding rhythm that maddens the blood like drums. The deck-holes are filling fast with 20-pounders that flail like thunder as the blood-mist steams above their thousand throes. The run stops as suddenly as it began. A storm is rising, and the fish go down.

For days on end, the tough little clipper rides the fierce chubasco, as lightning sprouts like trees on the horizon, and the towering waves break over her stout prow. Then south to the Galapagos, “the ash heap of the world.” Off these volcanic isles another scoop is made for bait. On the ledges of the overhanging rocks, the huge iguana rustle, and at night a volcano spews its fairy fires. Day after day no fish, and days become weeks. The ship sets course for Peru, and there, after 13 weeks at sea, the big latch is made at last.

The dolphin give the cue, the clipper makes its play. The surface of the school, a shimmer of young fish, breaks open like taut skin as the ancients of the tribe come hurtling up to take the bait. The men in the scuppers see them coming and join forces for the battle—three poles now are roped to the same hook, and still the big backs bow and the heavy arms knot as 300-lb. tuna fly into the back troughs with each heave.

The run holds day and night until the lucky clipper is loaded to the lid with 360 tons of fish, and then she wallows home in triumph. For his four months’ work, each member of the crew has made himself $2,500—good pay if a man considers that most of it was made in 75 herculean hours.