Cinema: The New Pictures, Mar. 2, 1953

Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler; United Artists) is the first feature-length picture to be filmed in three-dimension, Hollywood’s hottest new trend. The story is strictly onedimensional: an intrepid engineer triumphantly helps build a railroad line in British East Africa in spite of the opposition of a couple of man-eating lions.

Photographed in Ansco color with the Natural Vision process (special polarized glasses for viewers), Bwana Devil gives a blurry illusion of depth. Producer-Writer-Director Arch Oboler, onetime radio scriptwriter, uses three-dimension as a trick rather than a creative tool. The moviegoer seems to see a lion leaping into his lap, a native throwing a spear from the screen. But even in 3-D, Bwana Devil is a singularly flat adventure yarn.

Anna (Lux Film; I.F.E.) is an Italian-made melodrama that bears a striking resemblance to a slick U.S. thriller. An alluring nightclub singer (Silvana Mangano) is torn between true love for an honest farmer (Raf Vallone) and sordid passion for a shady bartender (Vittorio Gassman). When Vallone kills Gassman in a hand-to-hand encounter, Silvana renounces the world and becomes a lay sister at a hospital. At this point, just when it appears that the movie is running out of plot, Vallone is seriously injured in an automobile accident and is wheeled into Silvana’s hospital.

To exploit the picture’s obvious possibilities, the producers of Anna have dubbed in English dialogue for the American market. It might very well give some of Hollywood’s own brand of hokum a run for its money at the box office.

Tonight We Sing (20th Century-Fox) is an opulent, star-spangled, two-hour film concert featuring the famed clients, past & present, of famed Impresario S. (for Sol) Hurok. The picture offers such flesh & blood talents as Tamara Toumanova, Isaac Stern, Roberta Peters, and the sound-track voice of Jan Peerce. It also fondly recalls such historic Hurok clients as Anna Pavlova. Eugéne Ysaÿe and Feodor Chaliapin.

To go with these highbrow attractions, the picture presents a fairly lowbrow, offstage story loosely based on Hurok’s 1946 autobiography, Impresario. Hurok (David Wayne) is depicted as a sort of Russian Horatio Alger who migrated to America, and became in short order the Barnum of the arts by purveying musical culture to the masses. For drama, the picture develops a domestic schism between Hurok and his wife (Anne Bancroft), caused by his excessive devotion to his work.

Tonight We Sing is at its slickly Technicolored best when it makes music. As Russian Ballerina Anna Pavlova, Toumanova dances the famed Dying Swan. As noted Belgian Violinist Eugéne Ysaÿe, Isaac Stern plays a Wieniawski Concerto and Sarasate’s Ziegeunerweisen. As Basso Feodor Chaliapin, Ezio Pinza, in a blond wig, swaggers off with the show by giving a lustily humorous performance and singing snatches from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Gounod’s Faust, and a chorus of The Volga Boatman. These latter-day artists offer an earnest approximation of the originals. David Wayne, using a vaguely Russian accent, plays Hurok as a kind of uncommercially-minded wet nurse to a gang of temperamental darlings. Veteran Hurok himself, now 64 and one of the shrewdest showmen alive, would undoubtedly be the first to admit that he has done as much as anyone to make an industry out of art.

I Confess (Warner) is an Alfred Hitchcock whodunit with an intriguing premise: a Canadian priest (Montgomery Clift) is accused of murder, but cannot reveal the identity of the real killer because his lips are sealed by the confessional. The picture develops its theme in straightforward fashion with few surprises and plot twists. Since the audience knows from the beginning who the killer is, his undoing comes about in a rather lame climax.

A good, workmanlike thriller, I Confess, is only fair-to-middling Hitchcock. Unlike his best movies, it is often verbal instead of visual. There is a talky courtroom trial and, unusual for Hitchcock, a soggily sentimental flashback depicting a romance between the priest before he entered the church and a girl (Anne Baxter) who later marries a member of the Quebec Parliament. In the leading role, Montgomery Clift frequently appears more deadpan than stoical. Most authentic touches: Karl Malden’s portrait of a hard-working detective and some real Quebec backgrounds.