Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of “The Wizard of Oz,” which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity. I will rest my case against “The Wizard of Oz” on one line of dialogue. It occurs in a scene in which the wicked witch is trying to persuade Dorothy, the little girl from Kansas, to part with a pair of magic slippers. The good witch interrupts them, warning Dorothy not to give up the slippers, whereupon the wicked witch snarls, “You keep out of this!” Well, there it is. Either you believe witches talk like that, or you don’t. I don’t. Since “The Wizard of Oz” is full of stuff as bad as that, or worse, I say it’s a stinkeroo.

The vulgarity of which I was conscious all through the film is difficult to analyze. Part of it was the raw, eye-straining Technicolor, applied with a complete lack of restraint. And the gags! Let me give you just one. Dorothy is telling the Wizard about the fate of the wicked witch. “She just melted away,” Dorothy says. “Liquidated, eh?” the Wizard comes back, quick as a flash. He’s a card, that Wizard; you ought to hear him ribbing the boys in Dave’s Blue Room some morning. Bert Lahr, as the Cowardly Lion, is funny but out of place. If Bert Lahr belongs in the Land of Oz, so does Mae West. This is nothing against Lahr or Miss West, both of whom I dearly love. I don’t like the Singer Midgets under any circumstances, but I found them especially bothersome in Technicolor.

“The Old Maid” has many virtues. It is a faithful transcription of a well-written, though far from brilliant, play. It is a costume piece in which the feeling of the period goes deeper than the clothes worn by the actors; it is impossible to imagine the action taking place in a different time or locality. The characters are well conceived, they react credibly, and they actually develop as the action progresses. The story is adult, insofar as it is concerned with something beyond getting a certain girl into the arms of a certain man. But how dull it is! Written and directed with no variety or change of pace, “The Old Maid” just trudges sensibly along to its inevitable conclusion, and then stops. This is not to say, however, that Bette Davis’s performance in “The Old Maid” will not win her the Academy Award for 1939. All that renunciation, all those tight-lipped, understated, half-lighted scenes with the jealous sister and the illegitimate daughter—it’s in the bag, folks.

The charge of dullness cannot be laid against “When Tomorrow Comes.” James M. Cain, who concocted the story, has tossed into the Irene Dunne-Charles Boyer-Barbara O’Neil triangle quite a few surprises. Miss Dunne is a waitress in a chain restaurant who successfully engineers a strike—the first time, to my knowledge, that the labor question has been so taken for granted in a full-length commercial production. Even after this warning, I bet you won’t believe your ears when Mr. Boyer says, “I have a union card,” and Miss Dunne shrewdly asks, “C.I.O. or A.F. of L.?” Then there is a lovely, demented wife—beautifully played by Miss O’Neil—and a hurricane which forces the lovers to spend the night in the organ loft of a flooded church. Then there is a scene in which Mr. Boyer, who plays a famous concert pianist, pounds out great, crashing chords during a thunderstorm, and there’s—oh, what isn’t there? See it, by all means. ♦