The New Pictures, Mar. 29, 1948

The Search (MGM) is a kind of picture which Hollywood should be thanked for sponsoring. It was produced in Switzerland and in Occupied Germany, by Lazar (The Last Chance) Wechsler, without benefit of movie marquee names. Its subject—Europe's D.P.s—is alive, urgent and deeply moving.

The suffering of millions of people is beyond comprehension. Wisely, this story focuses on just two individual samples of it—a Czech mother (Metropolitan Soprano Jarmila Novotna*) and her little boy (Ivan Jandl, who was "discovered" in a Prague radio station).

The mother, obsessed with her search for the child that she cannot believe has died, walks the endless, desolate German Autobahnen from D.P. camp to D.P. camp. The child, who has had his power of speech, his very memory torn out of him, is a pure derelict, looking for nobody and nothing beyond the next mouthful of bread.

The boy stages a desperate runaway (the children think they are going to be gassed); the UNRRA officials believe he has drowned.

When a couple of American soldiers (Montgomery Clift, Wendell Corey) pick him up, they have to tame him as if he were a wild animal. Gradually he finds that he can trust them, and begins to learn English—just as nine-year-old Ivan Jandl did to play the part. Watching an officer's wife with her child, the boy begins to realize what a mother is, and what is lacking in his own life. Some of the suspense and coincidence through which the mother and son are finally reunited may seem a little overcalculated, but in postwar Europe fact is often stranger than fiction.

Much about this film is admirably straight and simple. The cast, including a number of nonprofessionals picked up on the spot, is generally restrained and persuasive. The picture's background—the shattered corpse of Germany—is appalling.

Yet in some important respects The Search is a disappointment. Producer Wechsler and Director Fred Zinneman are not, at best, very vigorous or inventive moviemakers. Their subject, enormous almost beyond tragic reach, is frequently reduced to the scale of gracious sentimentality. The moral complexities of the subject are dealt with so shyly that one can scarcely be sure they are consciously dealt with at all.-Despite its lack of real-life vitality (as in Shoeshine The Search may be a popular success. If so, it will help Hollywood find the courage for more such ventures. A studio willing to go the whole hog in daring—i.e., to tackle so powerful a subject, entrust it to strong men with bold ideas, guarding only against artiness and pretension—would be in serious danger of turning out a major movie.

The Miracle of the Bells (RKO Radio), an adaptation of Russell Janney's fragrant bestseller, is a "religious movie" —of a sort. Its box-office gross should be a fair measure of the depths of U.S. pseudo-religious depravity.