Cinema: The New Pictures, Feb. 24, 1958

The Gift of Love (20th Century-Fox). "Don't adopt me," lisps the plain little girl at the orphanage to the lady who has come looking for a foster child. "I don't usually work out." Her eyes are sort of squinty and set a little too close together. Her teeth are pretty scarce. How can the lady resist? Certainly a lot of moviegoers will not be able to. Evelyn Rudie is the most fetching representation of daddy's darling that Hollywood has come up with since Margaret O'Brien retired undefeated as hopscotch champion of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and does she ever know how to steal a scene! In fact, she steals the picture.

Trouble is, the picture is hardly worth stealing. Based on a Good Housekeeping story by Nelia Gardner White, it assumes in its audience an unquestioning acceptance of those articles of faith that have made women's-magazine fiction what it is today: I) men are such babies; 2) women know best; 3) children are cute; 4) marriage is the continuation of childhood by other means; 5) home is where the hurt is, and the most practical thing a woman can put in her trousseau is a crying towel; 6) love makes up for everything, even for not helping with the dishes; 7) death does not really make any difference if two people truly love each other—a competent woman can manage a man from the grave almost as well as she can from the breakfast table.

The woman (Lauren Bacall) in this picture is very competent indeed, and when she discovers that she is going to die of a heart ailment, she calmly begins to arrange her husband's domestic future for him. Naturally she does not tell him about her condition—men are such babies.

The first thing he will need, she decides, is somebody to keep him interested in life. Since they have no children, she adopts one. Women know best, of course, so never mind whether the woman in this case is really doing her husband a favor—let alone the child. Still, children are cute, and this one is ever so. But the husband, a brain who does basic research in theoretical physics, does not seem to enjoy living in the same house with a walking edition of Bright Sayings, and it takes a special visitation by the ghost of Lauren Bacall, accompanied on the sound track by a heavenly choir, to win him over. This is probably the nicest thing Hollywood has said for years about a heavy thinker.

The Brothers Karamazov (MGM) is Hollywood's retelling of the Dostoevsky classic. Like all great works of art, the novel has an elusive way of being all things to all men. Psychologists have hailed it the profoundest of all psychological novels; diplomats still read it as a key to Russian life and temperament. To historians, it is a bomb of a book that shattered the complacent pane through which 19th century Europe surveyed the weather of the soul. To the religious, it is a prophecy of the apocalypse that has been visited upon the 20th century, and a sovereign medicine to the malady of unbelief. But to Hollywood, it makes none of these points. What Dostoevsky was really trying to express, according to this picture, is a simple, eternal verity: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.