Hollywood has progressed a lot less than it may want people to think. The Kenmore's twelve-year-old adaptation of Sir J. M. Barrie's story of a newly hired little minister who wins over both a Scotch village and a vixen shows this very well. For "The Little Minister" is among the best movie entertainment to reach Boston in a long time.

In this day of casting most roles with a tape-measure and a scale of box-office receipts, it is almost incredible to find motion pictures in which people talk and look and act just as they should. "The Little Minister" is one of them. Katherine Hepburn does the completely ingenuous ex-Gypsy girl, who wins over the young curate, with a burr in her voice and a freshness that trails heather and high hills. John Beal is carefully naive and confused as the preacher himself. The rest of Barrie's characters are animated with a fidelity and attention to detail that only one similar movie, "Great Expectations," has recently equalled. Max Steiner, who is still going strong at this sort of thing, knitted a musical background into the story which quietly manages to take over an important part of the mood-setting on its own. The photography is simple and sane; the scenery alone, is worth the ticket price. "The Little Minister" is no movie to miss.

It would be a good idea to sit through the even more venerable "The Bride Walks Out"; its completely dated gags and situations go far to point up the timelessness of the Barrie story. It is also interesting as a prematurely exhumed time-capsule of the early '30s, with their long skirts, rectangular automobiles, fifteen-cents-for-the-first-quarter-mile taxicabs, and an unwrinkled and suspiciously flat-chested Barbara Stanwyck making the inevitable Hollywood decision about Career vs. Home.

Other points of interest include Robert Young, who hasn't changed a bit since the picture was made, and the characterization, strange in this day of science-on-the-comic-pages, of engineers as earnest young men who scurry around in knee-breeches lugging a surveyor's transit under each arm. Young appears thoroughly crocked for the majority of the movie, which is no loss. It makes you appreciate Hepburn just so much more.