Mine Own Executioner

This picture is packed. It's got everything but a wild west chase. The story of a British psychiatrist who can't solve his own problems, "Mine Own Executioner" bonsts a murder, a suicide on a tenth-floor ledge, a hair-raising ladder climb, a schizophrenic, a plane going down in flames, a sinister Luger, Japanese torturers, truth serums, a to-the-rescue courtroom exoneration, and a little boy whose gap-toothed, trusting grin sets everything right in a fogless London.

Alexander Korda imported Burgess Meredith to England to play the thoughtful, smiling, pipe-smoking analyst, who, exasperated by his ineffectual, though devoted spouse, falls in love with another woman. So intent is he on curing a young ex-flyer who has tried to kill his own wife, that the psychiatrist is unable to patch up the disintegrating marriage in his own home.

Most of the Jerry-built thrills are saved for the last few minutes of the picture where they are rapidly stacked one on another until everyone is exhausted. When the rubble is cleared away, Meredith decides to stick to his job even though he had been blamed for letting his dangerous patient run loose. What's more, he realizes that his wife is "all he has" and somehow finds his own case cured. Mixed up in the end of the film is the implication that Meredith's own affair blinded him to the condition of his patient which ended in tragedy.

Psychiatrically, the picture appears valid. Although the unusual problems of a neurotic veteran with a guilt complex and an analyst who can't swallow his own pills seem always consistent and never phony, I couldn't help wishing that "Mine Own Executioner" had dug a little deeper into some of the most interesting, though less spectacular cases, that popped up here or there. The picture was designed to create suspense, and it looks like the writers slipped in justification for the tense climax afterwards. The suspense is there all right, but you've seen that part before.

The triangle situation luckily lacks the long passionate moments of hackncydom and Renunciation that inevitable turn up in homegrown productions. Instead of showing the audience that the analyst is cheating, "Mine Own Executioner" tips us off to the reasons and analyzes them.

The acting, though, is excellent right down the line. Meredith is only Meredith, but it fits. Dulcie Gray as his wife mixes helplessness with devotion and comes up with the correct martyrdom. But little black-haired Barbara White, who is on screen for ten minutes as the flyer's wife, is on her way to stardom. A mobile face that coordinates magically with her lines enables Miss White to strip everything unessential and distracting from the heart of her role. Kieron Moore stalks sulkily as her moody, proud, and dangerous husband.

As the second feature, "Nanook of the North" has returned. This classic Robert J. Flaherty documentary of a generation ago still surpasses a lot of current professional films. The simple portrait of an Eskimo family and its struggle against the snow and ice of the Arctic is enlivened further by the obvious enjoyment Nanook himself found in front of the camera. You can learn something from this picture, even if you're not interested in building an igloo or harpooning a seal through the ice. A "March of Time" feature about Broadway's current troubles rounds out the Exeter bill.