The Orson Welles' Romance Festival chugs on and the bag is not consistently wonderful but rather. Has its Moments Two of them this weekend are unconditionally 100 per cent guaranteed to draw enough safety walter from an audience's ducts to float the U.S.S. Nimitz. Make Way for Tomorrow, Leo McCarey's 1937 surefire crier about an old, disowned couple is something of a can't lose proposition from the director's point of view. The performances though, are simply impeccable. There was a stock of oldish actors in Hollywood in the thirties that a studio could draw on to play the ancient, sweet and wise. This picture has two of the best--Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi. Moore especially, hesitant, stuttering and practically irresistible had already cleared a career as one of Broadway's great musical comedy stars (he was the original Alexander Throttlebottom in Of Thee I Sing) when he made this movie and his appeal is immediately self-evident. The next night at the Welles, if you're not dehydrated, you can find Wuthering Heights. I took a course last year on the Novel and the Cinema, one of those hybrid classes which inevitably slights both sets of contributing genes--all three of the heavies teaching the course hated the movie, and if you're a Bronte purist you will too. But of all the romances to hit this festival, this movie by a long shot is the best. Olivier made his first American appearance in it and he is, will always be, the only Heathcliffe for anyone who sees it. It was, he says now, the moment when he learned how to act for a camera and there are all sorts of great stories about the filming of the movie. Sam Goldwyn almost fired him three times because he insisted on putting so much make-up on that he was unrecognizeable. "He's the ugliest actor I've ever seen!" Goldwyn screamed at the director, William Wyler. Wuthering Heights was written by, of all people. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur The script is the essence of the chord that less talented screenwriters tried to put out and couldn't. It gushes, but skillfully and effectively:

The scene dissolves to the MOORS--EARLY MORNING Shafts of sunlight pierce through the clouds, now and again illuminating the landscape

CATHY Maybe we belong to the moors (impulsively) You're strong Heathcliffe, you're so strong Make the world stop right here--make everything stop--and stand still and never move again--the moors never change--and you and me never change...

HEATHCLIFFE. The moors and I will never change--don't you Cathy.

CATHY. I can't. I can't. No matter what I say or do. Heathcliffe, this is me--forever.

(MUSIC)

And that was part of the art of screenwriting: forget whether it looks like garbage on paper. Will it read well? Wuthering Heights does, and it works, although no one would dare try anything like it now.

The Great Gatsby. Maligned and deservedly. Movies progress, but they don't necessarily get any better, and Gatsby is pretty good proof. When it gets sentimental, it doesn't do it a quarter as well as Wuthering Heights and when it talks about America, it misses the boat altogether. If it had only done as sensitive a translating job as The Day of the Locust has done, it might have been at least a decent, if not well-liked, movie, it closes in on all the wrong things, and gets at nothing that Fitzgerald did. Only one performance really works and that is Sam Waterston's sensitive and physically correct Nick. He, not Redford, is "better than the whole damn bunch of them."