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But it is Britain's Margaret Leighton, known to U.S. audiences as the star of Broadway's Separate Tables (TIME, Nov. 5, 1956), who is able to take the onlooker by the scruff of his emotions and lift him out of his seat. She plays the heroine's prodigal mother, a poor, silly, flirty, middle-aged Southern charmer who has lost her looks and finds she has nothing left to live on but her relatives, her whisky and a vanity case full of messy little memories. She comes home to discover that the daughter she abandoned at birth is a half-grown woman who needs her desperately. She longs to help her; for the first time in her miserable, selfish life she longs to do something for someone else. She finds that she cannot; she is not woman enough, is not human enough. The moment when mother and daughter must at last confront each other—when the mother must confront her whole life and understand that it has been wholly wasted and is now really and truly finished—is a scene of tragic force.
The Sins of Rose Bernd (President Films) is a strongly moving, somewhat silly modernization of a well-known play by German Naturalist Gerhart Hauptmann. First produced at the turn of the century, Rose Bernd was an angry editorial against man's inhumanity to unmarried mothers, and it stirred the social conscience of Europe. Like most editorials, Hauptmann's diatribe has lost something of its burning urgency in the course of half a century. Many people are still cruel to girls who get in trouble, but in most civilized communities such cruelty no longer enjoys social approval. The film therefore often seems to be crying over mopped-up milk; and at some of the most touching moments, it sounds almost like a ponderously wacky parody of an old-fashioned matinee drama.
Rose Bernd (Maria Schell) is a pretty maid of all work—and how the villains pursue her. The first of them (Raf Vallone) is the worst of them, but he is the one she likes best—a muscle-bound young buck who takes what he can get. Wading after her into the tall grass, he pants: "Es geht wie geschmiert" Rough translation: "She'll go like grease." English subtitle: "She's a cinch."
The second villain (Leopold Biberti) is her employer, a charming older man. One dark night the employer comes skulking into her bedroom. She gives birth to her baby in a culvert on a freezing winter day. Goodbye, cruel world? Not at all. An alternative (Hannes Messemer) has presented itself, and Rose, having learned her lesson, goes forward to face the future and make a better life.