"The Enchanted Cottage" deserves a good notice. No reviewer who has urged realism and honesty upon a film industry plagued with artificialities can fail to wonder whether RKO has not pioneered the way toward artistic integrity--and the thought of artistic integrity on Hollywood is rather startling. "The Enchanted Cottage" is warm, unaffected, ingenuous realism--however much one may doubt that it is good entertainment.

Here is a departure from the accepted cinema idiom. People go to the movies today to relax in the cushion of familiarity, the familiarity of beautiful people in standard patterns. The cult of film actors, it appears, lagoon the lapse of the religion of perfection: yet it lapses, happily, in "The Enchanted Cottage."

It took bravery and initiative for Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young to submit to the disfigurement enforced by the adapted Pinero plot. "Enchanted Cottage" is the story of a burst balloon: a manned veteran is thrown into a magic setting with an ugly girl, and in each other they gradually find an escape from the world neither can hear to face. In their enchanted cottage, she appears beautiful, and to her, he is no longer disfigured. The illusion must meet its test when their moral courage comes inevitably into contact with the world of reality.

But no great quantities of salt are required to digest "Enchanted Cottage's" elfin consomme, for it is subtly spiced with acting that is something distinct from the sleep-walking with which most productions are content.

Hailed as the successor to "Claudia," "The Enchanted Cottage" maintains that rare quality of its predecessor, the retention of stage devices on the screen. Progressing from "Claudia," it gives the camera a freer rein and escapes the charge of not taking advantage of its medium. Still, there are no airplane duels or automobile chases in "The Enchanted Cottage": the tranquility and reliance on suggestion that characterize the theatre also characterize this movie. jgt