There is probably no actress today better suited to play Joan than Ingrid Bergman. She has said that it has long been her ambition to do so, a factor which must have been partially responsible for her touching portrayal of the Maid in Maxwell Anderson's clap-trap "Joan of Lorraine," in which she appeared on Broadway.

It is therefore really incredible that the new motion-picture, "Joan of Arc," is such a very bad one. Considering the talent and the story, a worse job could not have been done. It is garish, turgid, and tedious. Its heavy-handedness and stupidity exemplifies much that is wrong with Hollywood. It is Joan of the Arc Lights.

The screenplay has been "based" on Anderson's play though the similarity is only in the names of some of the principal characters. Mr. Anderson, along with another fellow, has written the dialogue. He has employed that old device of his to give his characters and his lines a child-like and pristine quality: they speak in the indicative tense (after all, in Those Days had they yet discovered the other tenses?) and without contractions. This sometimes gives the false impression of wisdom to lines that would otherwise seem ordinary.

The first hour of the film is a little better than the last hour-and-a-quarter. It deals with Joan's first hearing the voices (which miraculously are kept off the sound track) and her subsequent struggles to see the Dauphin. It is not until the Siege of Orleans that all patience is lost with Walter Wanger and Company and is never again regained.

You can almost hear the little men planning it: "Now we come to this Orleans scene, see. It's gonna be a tremendous battl', flaming arrows, charging horses, our side losing with spears going clear through guys in front of the camera; it'll be better than 'Fort Apache.''' Another voice: '''Fort Apache,' hell. 'Unconquered' will look like a scramble for peanuts compared to this." First voice: "Right! And through it all there'll stand Ingrid all in white, waving her men on with her flag and a different colored sunset behind her for each shot." Second voice again: "It'll be galorous, to coin a phrase. And considering' we ain't got no Indians..."

For the performance of Miss Bergman, very little can be said; the few incidents in which the camera allowed her to act were marred for this observer by recognition of some familiar acting tricks which she has used too repeatedly to be now excusable. My firm belief that Miss Bergman is a fine actress was shaken but not yet shattered. Since she is a partial producer of this monstrous epic, however, her taste and judgment are surely suspect.

In the other roles, Jose Ferrer, as the Dauphin, is rather interesting, and Francis L. Sullivan, as Cauchon, is menacing enough; but since his part in the plot called for him to prolong my stay at the Astor long after my interest had left, I'm not saying anything good about him at all.