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Yet this is more of a loss than a gain ; for Miss Barrymore's incorrigible abilities as an enchantress, however inappropriate to the role, were practically all that made the play shine. Moreover, Miss Davis is not old enough, as Miss Barrymore was, to keep every hint of boy-meets-girl out of the teacher's moving relationship with the uncouth young miner who is her star pupil. Newcomer John Dall, as the miner, cares a lot for his role, but he is too urban and smooth to convey much power through it, once he gets the coal dust off his face. Another newcomer, Joan Lorring, as a hysterical little cockney slut who gets herself and the young man in trouble, mixes talent and overemphasis in about equal parts. Hit of the show: Rosalind Ivan, having herself a high old time as the cockney tart's earthy, evangelistic mother.
The Unseen (Paramount) has the makings of a good scare picture: an in quisitive governess (Gail Russell); a suspiciously unpleasant widower (Joel McCrea); a medical neighbor with a voice like sloe gin (Herbert Marshall); a brutal and mysterious murder; two edgy chil dren (Nona Griffith and Richard Lyon) in sadistic league about some grim secret; a sour-eyed furnace-fixer (Mikhail Rasumny) ; and a rumor of wandering lights in the boarded-up mansion next door.
The picture has provocative trimmings, too: the locked front door which oddly keeps opening in the dead of night; the newspaper clipping about the murder in the little girl's scrapbook; the little boy's curious addiction to a raucous recording of There'll Be Some Changes Made; his disquietingly systematic habit of hanging a toy elephant in his nursery window and lying awake watching it; his inexplicably intense hatred of his new governess. As sophisticated Producer John Houseman and his players knock these and other ingredients against each other, they give off an occasional resonance that makes your flesh creep for the nearest mental foxhole.
But that doesn't happen nearly often enough. Besides a general, jerky tortuousness of plot and hint and good red herring, separate scenes are overtrained to a point at which, matched together, they are too stale for the race. The picture lacks, overall, a sense of what to emphasize and what to relax about — notably in its failure to make you constantly feel, or see enough of, the cavernous menace of the empty, busy house next door. There are, however, some flashes of really frightening evil in young Richard Lyon, and Gail Russell has a gift for conveying the shyly spirited, awkwardly exciting qualities proper to a beautiful governess who doesn't quite know her place.
The Valley of Decision (MGM), Marcia Davenport's highly colored best seller about steel and several generations of steelmen and their women and chil dren, would have been no easy job to adapt for the screen, at best. In choosing too often the better part of valor, MGM has permitted too little of the imaginable best to survive. It was probably discreet to reduce Mrs. Davenport's 790-page chronicle to a few years and a few major episodes, but they move with little essential vitality, at a wedding-march pace.