The Doctor's Dilemma (Comet; M-G-M). The Fabian intellect and the Wagnerian soul were the lion and the unicorn of Bernard Shaw's personal mythology and creative life. In his later writings these opposites lie down together peacefully in the green pastures of Creative Evolution, but in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) the two tendencies almost tear each other, and the play, apart. With all his romantic soul, Shaw longed to write a tragedy of the one and the many, of the creator-criminal murdered by the power of positive thinking and collective morality. With all his ironic intelligence, he knew what fun he could have with a satiric vivisection of the medical profession. Unhappily, he decided to do the two plays in one. The unexpected result: the comedy makes the tragedy seem pretentious and high-flown, and the tragedy makes the comedy seem at times no better than common bladder farce. Besides, after 52 years on the boards, the situation and some of the characters are getting rickety.
Nonetheless, this modest, seldom brilliant, sometimes even repulsively cute film version of the play, made in England by Anthony (The Browning Version) Asquith, is a pertly entertaining piece of photographed theater. With the bland commercial irreverence that Shaw admired in himself but loathed in his producers, Director Asquith has cast Shaw's pearls of wit among some of the biggest camera hogs in the business. Robert Morley and Alastair Sim bear small resemblance to the characters Shaw had in mind, but in company with John Robinson and Felix Aylmer they make a ludicrously Aristophanic chorus of sawbones. On the serious side, Director Asquith has had more surprising success. Dirk Bogarde (Doctor in the House, et seq.), best known in the U.S. as a sort of British Robert Wagner, turns in a remarkably subtle and mature performance as the heroic villain. As for the heroine, any competent judge of film flesh might confidently have ranked Leslie (Gigi) Caron a little lower than Jayne Mansfield on any list of Girls Least Likely to Succeed as a Shavian Heroine. But as Mrs. Dubedat, an intellectual's woman in whom Shaw himself saw little more than charm, Actress Caron suggests that her personal and momentary charm is really the mysterious recollection of le charme eternel.
Some Came Running (M-G-M), James (From Here to Eternity) Jones's best-selling second novel (TIME, Jan. 13, 1958), was a 1,266-page description of almost continuous sexual activity, climaxed with frequent and flagrant violations of the English language. But the book at least had the distinction of being the biggest (2 lbs. 11 oz.) literary clinker of the year. The film, perhaps because it has necessarily been sterilized by the censor, is not nearly so successful. In the last twelve months there have been at least two major movies (The Vikings and A Farewell to Arms) that were even more absurdly awful.