The New Pictures

Bright Road (M-G-M), a drama of Southern Negro life, spins a slight, sentimental story about a pretty, fourth-grade schoolteacher (Dorothy Dandridge) and a handsome principal (Harry Bellafonte) who, through kindness and understanding, reform a rebellious, eleven-year-old pupil (Philip Hepburn). The picture tells its story simply and straightforwardly. Unfortunately, for all its charm, it often seems unreal. The writing and direction are stilted, things have a too-well-scrubbed look, and the characters frequently appear stiff and selfconscious. In the main roles. Nightclub Singers Dandridge and Bellafonte, making their movie debuts, are at their best when the picture gives them an opportunity to sing a lullaby, a church hymn, or a folk song.

Trouble Along the Way (Warner) travels a well-worn screen route along which moviegoers will encounter some fairly familiar figures: a humorously crotchety rector (Charles Coburn) of an impoverished Roman Catholic college, a cynical ex-football coach (John Wayne) who comes to the school's rescue by trying to put together a winning gridiron team, a pretty probation officer (Donna Reed) who, at the instigation of Wayne's unpleasant ex-wife (Marie Windsor), is investigating whether Wayne's eleven-year-old daughter (Sherry Jackson) is being neglected by her father. By the time Trouble Along the Way reaches its dramatic destination, the football team has won, the school has its funds, and Sherry has a new mother in the person of the probation officer.

Shrewdly contrived, Trouble Along the Way goes all the way in trying to squeeze the last tear and laugh from its material. Nonetheless, it is high-toned hokum. Stealing the show from veteran Actors Coburn and Wayne is eleven-year-old Sherry Jackson in an artfully artless performance as Wayne's pert young daughter.

I Believe in You (J. Arthur Rank; Universal-International) is a British-made film that sets out to show the human side of the law. It succeeds in its aim all too well. Taking as its central characters a couple of probation officers attached to a London magistrates' court, the picture piles enough melodrama on its theme to convince even the most doubting moviegoer that probation officers and probationers are human, after all.

In a kaleidoscopic series of case histories, a gallery of probationers, ranging from the wicked to the underprivileged and mentally defective, are pictured in predicaments ranging from comedy to tragedy. A few of the excessive characters: a young hoodlum (Harry Fowler) and a delinquent teen-ager (Joan Collins) who fall in love with each other; a drunken society girl (Ursula Howells); an old lady (Katie Johnson) who suffers from the delusion that her cats are being poisoned; a faded vaudeville star (Ada Reeve) living on her memories and press clippings.

The direction and acting are more restrained than the plot. Celia (Brief Encounter) Johnson makes the part of a dedicated probation officer warmly moving. As a retired Colonial-Office official who decides to take up probation work, Cecil Parker brings a jauntily sly humor to his role.

The System (Warner) methodically goes through the steps of putting together a crime melodrama. But it has far too little action, is much too flabby and too gabby. The plot: a powerful newspaper publisher (Fay Roope) objects to his daughter (Joan Weldon) associating with Gambling Boss Frank Lovejoy. Things end fairly happily when Gangster Lovejoy, having come to the conclusion that "you can't run a clean sewer," spills all to a crime investigating committee and goes off to prison knowing that Joan will wait for him.

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