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But Coward nearly always writes with much purer feeling about unsophisticated women, and Celia Johnson and Kay Walsh make the most of some beautiful opportunities. Miss Johnson has a subtly balanced melancholic power, and an ability to convey complex emotions simply, which derive from the great days of the stage, and are almost never seen in a film. And the excellent director, David Lean (In Which We Serve, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter), has again rendered Mr. Coward as rich a service as Mr. Coward has rendered him.
The Teachers' Crisis (MARCH OF TIME) puts the pointer on one of the biggest U.S. problems—education. By narrative, charts and acted episodes, the film dramatizes the fact that, with public school enrollments bigger than ever before, and constantly growing, the U.S. has fewer public-school teachers than it had in 1939. Of these teachers many are pitifully ill-trained "emergency" amateurs. (The film shows the too common spectacle of a teacher unable to work a problem she has given students.) Still others are psychologically unfit to teach (the film shows a stupid teacher calling a pupil stupid).
The best as well as the worst teachers are fantastically overworked. Only about half those enrolled in state normal schools and teachers' colleges intend to teach;* there are graduates enough from these training schools to fill only about a third of the positions open. The situation is such that few but the timid, the incompetent, and those rare souls who have a true vocation for teaching can or will stick with such a job. The pay is disgracefully low (the average teacher gets from $800 to $3,100 a year). Socially, teachers are held in a special kind of contempt and are subject to prying and coercion in their private lives—and are, as a rule, subject to threats and to firing without any possible means of self-defense.
U.S. education is, in short, in grave danger. Little can be done toward removing this danger unless enough ordinary citizens realize its nature and dimensions, and realize also that it is going to cost a good deal of hard tax money, as well as permanent change of attitude, to buy out of it. Because this issue of MARCH OF TIME describes this predicament tersely and forcefully, it can be incalculably useful if enough people see it, take it to heart, and act on it.
Time Out of Mind (Universal-International), another of Hollywood's fumbling attempts to tell a story about a creative artist, reveals chiefly how little Hollywood knows about the problem of artistic creation.
Christopher Fortune (Robert Hutton), a sensitive type, has music in his soul and wants to go to Paris to get it out. But his father (Leo G. Carroll), a rock-bound Maine sea captain, sends him to sea instead. When his father orders a second voyage, Chris does not tell the old man to go keelhaul himself, and then leave home, penniless, to write music. He just lolls around sniveling until his domineering sister (Ella Raines) and his adoring sweetheart (Phyllis Calvert) finagle money enough to send him to Paris. Later on, Chris shows his contempt for the financial side of his art; at a public concert which his socialite wife has promoted for him he digresses, in mid-concerto, into A Bicycle Built for Two. But at long last he climbs off his bicycle, finds himself, his genius, his proper mate (Miss Calvert) and, thanks to her promotional talents, plays a triumphant return concert.