Come Back Little Sheba

Come Back Little Sheba impresses you with the wisdom of one academy award and the complete fatuousness of another. Not only Shirley Booth's performance, but the film as a whole, is the year's best, Mr. DcMille's technicolor elephants not withstanding.

More impressive than the obvious import of Miss Booth to play Lola is Hal Wallis' choice of Daniel Mann, the director of Sheba on Broadway, to film the screen version. Mann makes William Inge's portrait of frustration and wasted lives even more harrowing on film than it was on the stage. With few close-ups, the camera prowls the squalid little home of the Delaneys like a fascinated eavesdropper. It hides at the bottom of the stairs and catches the plump disarray of Lola as she wanders sleepily down to answer the door-bell; it watches the young boarder nuzzling her boy-friend; it peers across the room at Lola, confidently alone and wriggling happily to exotic music from the radio. Throughout the film, the viewer feels himself an embarrassed intruder on the intimacy of a real and frightening household--a tribute to Mann's direction and the expertness of the actors.

Miss Booth's performance is, of course, the highlight of the film. A strangely static character, Lola passively reacts to the hell around her but never really comprehends it. With wistful comfort from a distant but remembered past, she plods through the present listlessly, leaving her hair-brush on the breakfast table and her girdle in the bureau. A less gifted actress would make Lola only repulsive, infuriating for her aimless sloppiness, her complete lack of intellect and sensitivity. Miss Booth, however, draws an infinitely pathetic portrait of a lonely and well-meaning, but painfully limited woman unable to cope with her life.

A surprise of the film is the excellence of Burt Lancaster's performance as Lola's husband. Despite greyed temples and bushy eyebrows, he looks too young and fit for the role, but dramatically, he is completely convincing. As the reformed alcoholic trying to reconcile himself to his life with Lola, he has just the right tone of quiet and guarded desperation. And when the guard collapses and his bitterness and frustration explode in a tremendous jag, his performance has a terrifying intensity. To the smaller role of the young boarder who innocently shatters the deceptive calm of the Delaney home, Terry Moore brings an effective combination of naivete and seductiveness.

Usually faithful to the play, the film nevertheless ends on a more hopeful note. When Delancy returns from the alcoholic ward, he finds new curtains in the living room, and a well-groomed Lola eager to show that things have changed. With the option of a happy ending, the audience can contentedly leave Mr. Inge's unpleasant little story behind when the leave the theatre. But anyone who isn't determined to dismiss the disturbing will doubt that chintz and a girdle can conjure happiness out of the hopeless existence of Mr. Inge's characters.