Two Films

The important picture on the program at the Exeter is not the feature, Touch and Go, but an hour-long documentary entitled Helen Keller in Her Story. Much adulation has been poured on Miss Keller and much has been written about her, including a good deal of pseudo-inspirational treacle. She has been variously called a saint and used as a symbol of hope and human aspiration. But the excesses of hero-worship have tended to obscure the fact that Miss Keller is a most charming human being. It is the great service of this film that it reveals her as such.

With the help of old photographs, newsreels, and excerpts from previous motion pictures about her, the film presents a brief outline of Miss Keller's early efforts, under the tutelage of Annie Sullivan, to establish some means of communication with the world and win an education at Radcliffe. The most effective parts of the movie, however, are those which show a routine day in her life at her Connecticut home. With frequent flashes of humor, her eagerness for even the smallest of new experiences here stands revealed. Since she possesses a singularly photogenic face and a beautiful smile, she is a nearly perfect subject for a documentary movie, and the commentary, with fine taste held to an unadulatory key and spoken by Katharine Cornell, needs to do little more than provide for continuity. Helen Keller in Her Story won an Academy Award, and deserved it.

Touch and Go, in contrast, is not the sort of movie that will ever win an award. A pleasant though unpretentious British domestic comedy, the film concerns itself with a furniture designer who throws up his job and decides to pack up his family and emigrate to Australia. His plan begins to flounder when the family cat runs away and when, three days before the sailing, his teen-age daughter falls desperately in love. None of this, of course, has any great dramatic value, but it is frequently fun to watch. As the furniture designer, Jack Hawkins shows some talent as a comedian, even though he has turned in better performances in more serious roles. Margaret Johnston, who plays the designer's wife, does little more than pout, but June Thorburton, as the daughter, and John Fraser, as her young man, are both quite convincing and decorative. If nothing else, Touch and Go proves that a motion picture need not always be profound to be entertaining, and it format a pleasant contrast to an excellent documentary.