Life and Time Magazines on Movies This Week

This week Life devoted a multi-page photo spread to "The Green Years," revealing almost the entire plot. "It is a very satisfying film, full of reminders of the unhappiness of youth but spiced with comedy and larded with inoffensive sentiment. It is bound to be hugely successful," the article declared. Charles Coburn was singled out for providing the comic relief that "prevent the film from straying too far into hokum." He shared honors with 10-year-old Dean Stockwell, who was "free of the giggling cuteness found in many movie children."

Starlet Mona Freeman, bedecked with an Easter bonnet, was on the cover of the magazine.

Time reported on German biographer Emil Ludwig's evisceration of Hollywood in the French weekly La Bataille. "The men in high places are incompetent, their standards lower with each passing year. They rule with the power of wealth alone and push people of talent and knowledge to the wall," he said. Ludwig had been among a coterie of German artists and intellectuals who had found refuge in Hollywood during the War. He was not appreciative of the hospitality that he found and had returned to Europe. He had little good to say about anyone in the motion picture industry, but his scorn was deepest for producers, directors and agents. For more, see the Time article.

The magazine reported that Eastern Sound Studios in Manhattan had perfected the art of dubbing motion pictures into another language. Before this, apparently, Hollywood relied on subtitles or narrators when releasing their pictures abroad. With the war over, the overseas markets would again be an important source of revenue for the studios.

This week James Agee reviewed "From This Day Forward" and "The Kid From Brooklyn." "From This Day Forward" received gentler treatment than it did from some other leading critics. The reviewer wrote that the movie developed "unusual warmth, humaneness and honesty. This is sometimes seriously impaired by patronizing and oversentimental sympathy for simple folk." He cited the example of a working-class dance where "the couples jig almost as fantastically as high-lifers at a society ball in a Chaplin comedy." He also had a problem accepting Fontaine as a Bronx housewife. "She simply isn't that sorta girl." But "when the city itself, or the crummier aspects of its life, dominate the screen, the picture has vigor, beauty and authenticity."

Agee was not among the critics bowled over by Danny Kaye's genius in "The Kid From Brooklyn." While Kaye "delivers the laughs," they don't "drown out a good deal of creaking, clanking and whiffling" in "Sam Goldwyn's rather cumbrous vehicle."

Time also had a list of Best Bets. They were:

• • "Henry V," which had not yet opened in New York

  • "Ziegfeld Follies of 1946"

  • "The Sailor Takes a Wife"

  • "Open City"

  • "Vacation From Marriage"

  • "Adventure"

  • "The Lost Weekend"

Time also reported that:

• • It was not the steamy scene that sent smoke billowing while British actress Peggy Cummins was filming "Forever Amber," but a short circuit in the wiring. [Cummins apparently did not generate enough heat of her own and would soon be replaced in the role by Linda Darnell.]

  • Marie "The Body" MacDonald had won a legal battle to get out of her movie contract with producer Hunt Stromberg and claimed she was "shucking the nickname."

  • Howard Hughes was in trouble with the film commission for his advertising campaign for the movie "The Outlaw" in which pictures of Jane Russell's busty figure were accompanied by copy that said "The Music Hall gets the big ones" and "What are the two great reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom."