The Angel Wore Red (Titanus-Specta-tor; MGM) is a turbid Kleenex-sopper about an unfrocked priest (Dirk Bogarde) and a cabaret girl (Ava Gardner) who is frocked, but just barely. Bogarde and Gardner fall into intimate clutch during one of the first air raids of the Spanish Civil War. That very morning Bogarde had left the church because its hierarchy sympathized with Francisco Franco's rebels. But after the raid, in the kind of irony that cuts like a rubber dagger, he is hunted down by a mob of enraged Loyalists who have convinced themselves that the city's priests signaled enemy planes from the cathedral tower. (The Loyalists are represented as Communistic priest-murderers, and Franco's troops as mostly good joes.)
A good deal of heavyweight drama follows, much of it involving a holy relic that the villains want to get their hands on. Joseph Gotten honors cinematic tradition as a U.S. war correspondent. He wears an eye patch and is dressed in what looks like an Italian tailor's interpretation of Winston Churchill's siren suit. Nunnally Johnson is deeply involved; he wrote the film and directed it.
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
(Warner) is a friendly, fairly shrewd but not really profound look at some inhabitants of a small Oklahoma town. The time is the early 19205. and this is William Inge country—several hundred miles safely north of the swamps of Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers. but still south of that region where Booth Tar-kington's characters inhabit a perpetual fishworm and firecracker July. The people in the film made from Inge's 1957 Broadway hit have problems, but they do not include necrophilia, cannibalism or self-mutilation with garden shears; the difficulties are the sort a strong man can stare in the eye.
The strong man in question is a boisterous and usually self-confident fellow who is troubled because his wife nags him about money and keeps primly to her own side of the bed, his young schoolboy son is ragged by bullies, his daughter is afraid of boys, and he himself, being a harness salesman in the decade of the tin lizzie, has lost his job. Pat Hingle gave the Broadway role a ring of rowdiness soured by doubt. Robert (The Music Man) Preston performs rousingly in the considerably enlarged film part. But the ring of his lines is not doubt —it is seventy-six trombones.
Playwright Inge's intention, put over-simply, was to show that each soul has its dark places, and that people can, with love, help each other past these stair tops. Actor Preston just does not behave like a man afraid of the dark. He roars about, spending energy as if he could plow a field without a horse. The viewer knows that Preston will get another job, and can only grin when the frustrated fellow complains that his wife (Dorothy McGuire) treats him "like change from a nickel" and thunders out of the house vowing that "Ah'm goan to see Mavis Pruitt and ah'm goan to drink booze and ah'm goan to raise every other kind of hell ah kin think of."