MOVIEGOER

There is a natural drama in the making of steel--in the forging of iron and in the construction of huge blast furnaces--and MGM has taken this industrial drama, fused it with a bitter strife between labor and capital, added a touch of intra-family warfare, and come up with an effective, if overlong, adaptation of Marcia Davenport's best-seller, "The Valley of Decision."

Pittsburgh is the chosen scene of industrial empire and industrial strife; the steel-made fortune of the Scott family is cast together with the steel-made poverty of ironworker Pat Rafferty and family. The rise of Scott-hating Rafferty's daughter Mary as a maidservant in the Scott home, eventually to marry into the family, serves to weave the two sides of the railroad track into one history.

The intensity, and the tragic futility, of labor-employer relations in the rising steel industry form one of the several themes in the story. Inability to compromise their differences in sufficient time leads finally to the deaths of both William Scott and Pat Rafferty, and later to the estrangement of Mary and Paul Scott, heir to the steel empire.

Fresh from the lead in "Keys of the Kingdom," Gregory Peck appears as the logical, and similar, successor to Walter Pidgeon as Greer Garson's (Mary Rafferty) partner in marriage. Lionel Barry more is his usual explosive self as vindictive Pat Rafferty, while Donald crisp performs competently as a sympathetically presented steel magnate.

As a story of family relations and frustrated love, Mrs. Davenport's story makes first-rate screen material. The handling of the industrial warfare, however, leaves something to be desired. Though the human tragedy involved is played to the hilt, not enough attention is given to the real issues involved, the issue of men versus capital, the fight of American labor to gain decent working conditions in heavy industry. But MGM is to be commended for the lack of bias in its presentation, even though it has failed to get at the heart of the warfare. mss.