The New Pictures

Homecoming (MGM) features Clark Gable as an army surgeon named Ulysses and Lana Turner as an army nurse called Snapshot. At first they don't like each other at all, but after she has helped pull on his rubber gloves a few times, they begin to feel different.

But this is madness! Clark has a nice wife (Anne Baxter) in the States, and, by all that's Hollywood, he must go back to her. So Lana has to be disposed of finally--but not until her fans have seen plenty of Lana at the operating table, Lana at a Roman bath, Lana in the Battle of the Bulge, Lana on her deathbed.

The basic substance of Homecoming, like the base of a perfume, has a terrible smell; but to many moviegoers, the end product will seem quite pleasant. It is superskillfully custom-blended to please the vast public of Gable & Turner. World War II, reduced for long stretches to a faint, faraway hum, appears to have been just an old sweet song.

Arch of Triumph (Enterprise-United Artists) is one of the outstanding misfires of the season. Those who made it shoveled some $5,000,000 into the mixer; a couple of topflight romantic leads (Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer); a couple of topflight character actors (Charles Laughton and Louis Calhern); the strenuous talents of Director Lewis Milestone; a massive, studious production; and a somewhat bowdlerized version of Erich Remarque's best-selling romance about political derelicts in the limbo of 1939 Paris.

By no very odd coincidence, something went terribly wrong with this mixture: the cement began to harden before it could be poured, and all hands had to get it out of the machine by brute force. Now & then the picture faintly approximates the iron sadness and bitter glamor which Remarque tried for in his novel; most of the time the deep grimness of the subject and the schmalziness of its exploitation get embarrassingly in each other's way.

Charles Boyer, who is at once a master of schmalz and a very good actor, gives the picture such tone and unity as it has. Miss Bergman occasionally breaks loose with an eager bit of acting, but it is seldom persuasive. As an international tramp, she is as badly miscast as Boyer would be as an All-America fullback; and she is as tactlessly gowned as she is cast.

Messrs. Laughton, Camera and Milestone also do the best they can, and once in a while--notably at a White Russian birthday party--the picture comes to some kind of life. But on the whole the show has a kind of pathos that is not the kind intended; the spectacle of a lot of talented people, before and behind the camera, doing their desperate best in an effort which they seem clearly to know is foredoomed.

Fort Apache (Argosy; RKO Radio), John Ford's first movie since his apostolically solemn Fugitive, is an unabashed potboiler. An idiotically reckless martinet (nicely played by Henry Fonda) tries to impose spit & polish on a begallused garrison in the Far West. After leading a suicidal charge against the local Indians, he is posthumously adored as a hero--except by the men (John Wayne, et al.) who had to carry out his orders. His daughter, a stock Pert Chit by the name of Philadelphia Thursday (Shirley Temple), meanwhile romances with a young officer (played, in appropriate magazine-illustration style, by Miss Temple's real-life husband, John Agar).

The arguments, tiffs and free-for-alls with the Indians are filmed with casual mastery and are worth the price of admission. Ford and his crew, apt students of the great photographer Mathew Brady, have gotten a good deal of incidental beauty out of post-Civil War uniforms in various subtle kinds of open-air daylight. To counteract these pleasures, however, there are many protracted and unrewarding views of domestic life around the post, and some of the bleakest Irish comedy and sentimentality since the death of vaudeville.

April Showers (Warner) features the'Three Happy Tymes: 1) Big Tyme (Jack Carson), a baggy-pants vaudeville comic; 2) Small Tyme (Robert Ellis), a 12-year-old, performer who can almost fill his father's pants; 3) June Tyme (Ann Sothern), wife & mother of the family-act. Like most Hollywoodcuts of vaudeville days, this one tells a story that was old when its jokes ("I met her in a revolving door and we've been going around together ever since") were new. But Jack Carson, an energetic fellow with overtones of Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Wallace Beery, puts his nose to the putty with a will. And Robert Ellis is a winning cinemoppet. The rest of the picture falls somewhere between big and small tyme.

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