Six cameramen have teamed up to make Ivy Films' first motion picture a good one.

They have taken a plot which many people at the picture's premiere Friday night found inscrutable, and inked it in with some of the best photography this reviewer has ever seen.

Ivy's cameramen have carefully perceived things which Hollywood has only squinted at. They have caught the quick flash of sunlight off the front fender of a car. They have watched a pent-up ball of twine roll excitedly along a curbstone. They have found the texture of a masonry wall, and the quiet beauty of a row of tenements slanting downhill into the afternoon sun.

They have used this perception to shore up a plot which many people thought confusing. In Michael Roemer's story, which admittedly rests on "certain basic incongruities," characters and situations refuse to act predictably: a sad-eyed suicide breaks off knifing himself in a graveyard to retrieve a little girl's balloon; the hero loses his girl to his boss, and finds her married to the boss's chauffeur. Roemer has tried to knit the pace and problems of contemporary life into the limitations of a silent film; disunity and exaggeration result.

This disunity can be funny just as most slapstick comedy can be funny. Ivy Films have borrowed the Keystone Cop chase and the little circus car which spits out a steady stream of big men. It also means that the audience cannot sit back and chew popcorn and know what is coming off. They may even have to puzzle things out with Ivy Film's program. But this reviewer feels there is plenty of room for motion pictures which people have to sit up and watch.

The acting in "A Touch" is limited, again, by the pantomime requirements of the silent film. It meets them; the best praise for its cast is that no single actor stands out. Nicholas van Slyck's music, which the Ivy people dubbed in to carry along their picture, may be a little harder to chew. It raps out its accompaniment to "A Touch's" nervous action at a stacatto 32-frames to the second; it is a raucous, brash, nervous score, which occasionally edges onto the screen and points to itself and says "listen to me." This again makes the person with the Hollywood conditioned eye-car very uncomfortable. But Van Slyck's music is as superior to the sheep-grazing and grand-entrance-of-the-U.S.-Cavalry background score as the Ivy picture's subtle photography is to the antiseptic reproduction of a Hollywood sound stage.

Ivy Films has not made a movie which is entertaining along strict movie-review ideas of what makes for entertainment. It will not please Eight to Eighty, All the Kiddies, or even necessarily allow you to spend a Pleasant Hour at the U.T. You may find the photography extraordinarily sensitive; it might just as well give you a headache. The story can strike you as social commentary, or a cutting-room sweeping of unarticulated scenes. But "A Touch of the Times" will also let you know that there are people seriously pointing ahead towards movie-making as an art. It will show you that even in their creeping stage, these people can do a lot of things better than their million-dollar walking brothers.