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As the trumpeter's pianist sidekick, Hoagy Carmichael gives one of his effortless performances. Actor Douglas gives plenty of vitality to the central role, but he is called on to repeat a good deal of what he did in Champion; one scene, in which he bangs a trumpet to pieces and breaks into sobs, is almost a remake of the climax of his earlier film. Having discovered what Actor Douglas does best, Hollywood apparently is determined to work him to death at it.
The Astonished Heart (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) returns Britain's Noel Coward to the screen in the double role of scenarist and star.' For a while, it seems cause for mild celebration. Coward still handsomely fills a Mayfair drawing room with the glitter of verbal bric-a-brac. But when he begins using the stagy artifice of his comedies in behalf of a plot that combines half-baked psychiatry with bogus tragedy, even his admirers are likely to blush for him.
Coward plays a sedately married London psychiatrist who goes off his rocker over a flighty, glamorous divorcee (Margaret Leighton). His devoted wife, played by Celia (Brief Encounter) Johnson, introduces them, goes conveniently off to her mother's place so they can fall in love, and then understandingly dispatches them on a tour of the Continent so they can get the whole ugly mess out of their systems. What drives Coward into the jitters and finally off a housetop is not guilt over his own infidelity—perish the thought—but a suspicious jealousy of his mistress'.
In these ludicrously underplayed dramatics. Miss Leighton's role is the only one with any conviction, and she ably makes the most of it. Wearing his hauteur like a mask and registering most emotions with his eyebrows, Coward almost qualifies for a Broadway revue sketch parodying Noel Coward. In more ways than one, the victim of the piece is Celia Johnson, a fine actress doomed to wear a stiff upper lip through the whole ugly mess.