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Finely staged by the author, Another Part of the Forest is, much of it, finely acted. In particular, Percy Waram (The Late George Apley) plays Marcus quietly, with magnificent expressiveness, and Mildred Dunnock (The Corn Is Green) gives touching force to Marcus' broken, half-batty wife. And Jo Mielziner has provided what may well become his most famous sets.
That Brennan Girl (Republic) shows the effects of a sordid environment on an impressionable adolescent. The story, by Adela Rogers St. Johns, is a well-made, sob-sisterish superb with a newspaper-serial flavor.
The wretched girl (Mona Freeman) never had much chance to be respectable. Her tough, pretty mother (June Duprez) didn't want a big kid like her hanging around the house. Disguised as ma's little sister, the youngster matured fast into a bright, hard-surfaced young woman. She had clever fingers that could roll a drunken sailor and lift costume jewelry from the department store that employed her. From her two best men friends (James Dunn and William Marshall) she kept hearing pleasant rumors of how sweet and wonderful a real mom can be. But it takes the searing, purifying fires of her own motherhood to make a law-abiding woman of her.
The weight of a dampish plot hangs on the young mother's efforts to get away from baby long enough for an occasional hour of fun in the evenings. Some of the explicit, painfully realistic scenes are designed to scare the daylights out of parents who make a habit of leaving their young ones with teen-age sitters.
The Wicked Lady (Rank; Universal-International) tosses some semiconscious spoofing at all plumed-hat melodramas. Made more than a year ago in England, where it has been a box-office smash, this movie was frowned on by U.S. censors until some reshooting eliminated the low-cut Restoration dresses worn by the two leading actresses (TIME, Aug. 5). The moralists believe that the picture is now fit for U.S. moviegoers.
It is a frenzied cloak & dagger charade that will never be fit for anyone to take too seriously. Amid the romantic highwaymen, secret passages and poisoned elderberry wine, the bogus sentiments expressed by the actors are a perfect match for the bogus look of their hair pieces. With Margaret Lockwood romping through the man-crazy, trigger-happy title role, several other competent British players (James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones, Felix Aylmer) are involved in the breast-beating and eye-rolling.
Cinemogul Rank has recently sponsored a few excellent, skillfully made films that are giving the British product a good name in the U.S. This is not one of them.
Carmen (Scalera-Superfilm) is the same hot-blooded, unfettered gypsy hussy she always was ("free Carmen has been, and free she will always be"). This version, without singing, was begun in Italy in 1943 with French-speaking actors. Its plot is closer to the original Mérimée short story (1847) than to the opera (1875), but the Bizet score is used—much too cautiously—as background music.
The producers have turned the old melodrama into a pretty fast movie script: Escamillo's smugglers gallop back & forth across the mountains just like horse opera's cattle rustlers. But a little of the heavy dust that Carmen has accumulated in the last hundred years remains. The photography is expertly beautiful.