Half Angel (20th Century-Fox) tries to play schizophrenia for belly laughs and proves that psychiatry can be mangled as witlessly in a comedy as in melodrama. Its heroine (Loretta Young) is a primly correct girl whose subconscious, taking possession while she sleeps, turns her into a somnambulant femme fatale with a yen for a stuffy lawyer (Joseph Gotten).
The romance, which frosts over whenever Loretta's conscious mind is in control, is embellished with some embarrassingly precious dialogue. She calls Cotten a frog and wants to kiss his warts away; to him, she is "Princess Felicity" or "knucklehead." Her mental condition leads her to such fey adventures as spending the night in his bedroom (listening to him talk shop) and marrying him while her fiancé's back is turned.
Neither of the stars seems comfortable dispensing this nonsense, though many a Technicolored close-up confirms that Actress Young, 38, is one of the most rewardingly well-preserved sights in Hollywood. But what makes Half Angel especially disappointing is that it was written by Scripter Robert Riskin, whose horseplay with half-baked abnormal psychology is a sad comedown from such past comic successes as It Happened One Night and Mister 880.
He Ran All the Way (Bob Roberts; United Artists) extracts a full measure of excitement from the predicament of a family imprisoned in its own seamy flat by an unpredictable hoodlum (John Garfield) who turns the place into his hideout. Hunted by the police for murder and robbery, he lets members of the family out to perform their daily tasks—so long as one always stays behind as his hostage.
The picture's rumpled sets, James Wong Howe's shadowy photography, the lower-middle-class characterizations, are all well-keyed to a note of squalid realism. The script gives the hoodlum some depth as well as menace; he is stupid, confused, worried sick, and for all his bitterness and bullying, wants eagerly to be liked. The acting is first-rate, not only by Garfield, but by Shelley Winters, deglamorized as the simple, forlorn pickup whose home he invades, by Wallace Ford as her father, grimly swallowing his self-respect, and Selena Royle as the distraught mother.
Individual scenes are uncommonly taut, e.g., a drawn-out crisis in the dining room when Garfield insists that the family eat the turkey dinner he has bought, and Ford, driven to a rebellious gesture, seems ready to die before he will let them accept. But what trips He Ran All the Way well before it has run its length is a far-fetched romantic gimmick. It asks the moviegoer to believe that the girl, devoted to her parents and young brother (Bobby Hyatt), is lonely, frustrated and moonstruck enough to plan on running off with the criminal whom she has known only during the day or so he has spent terrorizing her family.
Fabiola (Jules Levey; United Artists), based on the 97-year-old novel by Britain's Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, pictures the ordeals and triumphs of the Christian martyrs in Constantine's Rome. Made in Italy three years ago with French and Italian actors romping toga-clad through elaborate sets populated by 7,000 extras, the movie has been dubbed into English and shrewdly released to steal the thunder of such forthcoming spectacles as MGM's Quo Vadis and 20th Century-Fox's David and Bathsheba.