Cinema: The New Pictures, Apr. 10, 1950

Cheaper by the Dozen (20th Century-Fox] is a movie version of the bestselling based-on-fact book about life with a father of twelve in the 19205. A plotless string of mild, rambling anecdotes, with Clifton ("Belvedere") Webb miscast in the central role, it is not much more fun than leafing through somebody else's family album.

Under the benevolent tyranny of Father Frank Gilbreth, an efficiency expert, the brood motors from Providence, R.I. to its' new home in Montclair, N.J., swarms into school, undergoes a whooping-cough epidemic, a mass tonsillectomy, a visit from a lady apostle of birth control. The oldest daughter (Jeanne Grain) wages a long uphill fight on father's prejudices against hair-bobbing, lipstick and dates with boys. Mother, torpidly played by Myrna Loy, takes a back seat but comes into her own when father dies.

The film's failure stems mainly from a futile attempt to blend Actor Webb's amusingly smug, know-it-all characterization of Mr. Belvedere into a story intended to stir up some emotional warmth. The result is seldom comic and never moving; it leaves Webb without much material worthy of a Belvedere and the movie's would-be warmth without the kind of character that might ignite it.

The Winslow Boy (London Films; Eagle Lion). Between 1908 and 1910, England was deeply stirred by a struggle between a teen-aged schoolboy and a hidebound bureaucratic government. At 13, George Archer-Shee had been expelled without trial from the Royal Naval

College. The charge: stealing a five-shilling postal order. At ruinous expense, the boy's family fought official smugness and red tape to get him a fair hearing. In winning his exoneration, they also affirmed the right of the humblest citizen to demand justice from the state.

In his London and Broadway stage hit, The Winslow Boy (1946-47), Playwright Terence Rattigan stuck fairly closely to the facts of the Archer-Shee case, while rigging them skillfully for theatrical effect. In the movie version, Scripters Rattigan and Anatole de Grunwald stick too closely to the play. As a result, despite some superior dialogue and top-drawer British acting, the film plods along with more patience than it is likely to find in U.S. moviegoers.

Rattigan's fidelity to Rattigan is also responsible for some troublesome defects. He commits the serious cinematic sin of letting his climax — the boy's final legal victory — take place offscreen, as it did offstage. In the play, the impossibly haughty barrister who wins the case was a rich treat of tasteful theatrical ham. But the grand-mannered role is so patently written to be played across footlights that, before the lifelike intimacy of the camera, even a technically flawless performance by Robert Donat fails to inspire belief. Usually an adept dramatic craftsman, Scripter Rattigan also runs up a debt to his audience that he never pays. The Winslow boy is finally cleared, but the movie fails to clear up the mystery of how such a volume of seemingly damning evidence came to be lodged against him.