None But the Lonely Heart (RKO-Radio), a story about the bewilderment, hope and sorrow of people in the slums of London's 1930s, is in many respects a most unusual picture.
It got its start toward celluloid when Matinee Idol Gary Grant, a warm admirer of Novelist Richard Llewellyn's works, told RKO's Executive Producer Charles Koerner that he wanted to play the novel's pimply, adolescent, Cockney hero, Ernie Mott. It got a propitious leg-up when young Producer David Hempstead called in Clifford Odets to do the screen play. It got itself and Hollywood a new and gifted director when Odets took on that job, too. For still more luster, Producer Hempstead—and the script—enticed Ethel Barrymore back into pictures.
By the time the picture was finished, nobody knew what to expect in terms of the box office. (Its first showings, according to Variety, were "modest" to "good" in Los Angeles, "standout" in Washington.) But however the film makes out financially, it is one of the pictures of the year, a feather in the cap of all concerned in its making. In the U.S., major productions have rarely dared to tackle so wholeheartedly so harshly human a subject.
Ernie Mott (Gary Grant), to be sure, is no longer pimpled or puerile, and no longer ends his story in vindictive dedication to petty crime; yet his meaning, as an embattled young man of his century, has been rather clarified than muddied in the movie. He begins as a cocky, kindly, no-count bum, the best motive for whose footlessness is his dislike for "cheating pennies out of poor devils poorer than meself." When he learns that his Ma (Ethel Barrymore) is soon to die of cancer, he stays home for a change, helping her with her fusty second-hand goods shop, fending off the devotions of a gently Bohemian cellist (Jane Wyatt) and, rather against his will, falling harder & harder for Ada (June Duprez), the cash-girl at a clattering little Fun Fair.
But once Ernie stands still enough to see the static pity of London's East End, and to know Ada's battered desire for security, he gets an angry fever for easy money, goes to work for Gangster Jim Mordinoy (George Coulouris). What he sees and learns under Mordinoy is anything but comforting, and where he finally winds up is not in heroics but in police court.
Ernie's big lesson comes, when he learns that Ma, tempted into crookedness through her desire to do handsomely by him, has become a fence for shoplifters. When he last sees her she is dying in a prison hospital.
At the picture's end, abetted by a gentle old prowler (charmingly played by Barry Fitzgerald), Ernie is beginning to see daylight at last. War is soon to engulf him. There, and always he knows now, he will "fight with the man who will fight for a human way of life." Human Beings. On the whole, Writer-Director Odets has kept his sociology as subdued as the warring lights and shadows and off -screen sound effects which he uses so fondly in his first picture.