Abstract

Films

The film "The Human Comedy," is an effort to create, through a series of lyrically casual, almost plotless scenes, the image of a good family in a good town in war time. A good many millions of people, will like it, as they liked the Andy Hardy films and Rupert Hughes's "The Old Nest," whose traditions it returns to rather more than improves on. The picture is mainly a mess, but as a mixture of typical with atypical failure, and in its rare successes, it interests the author more than any other film he had seen for a good while. The worst, lies less in its active failures of taste or of plain sense than in its easygoing, self-pleased, Mortimer Snerdish neglect of some magnificent opportunities. There are, exceptions. Most of them involve the one sound piece of casting and performance, that of Jack Jenkins as the four-year-old Ulysses, who, will not be used again, otherwise he will become just another actor.