Until 1994, there was a George Stevens film not in most filmographies, seldom seen, and not even shaped into a "movie." Entitled George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin, it is the 16mm color footage he shot himself in Europe as head of the Signal Corps Special Motion Picture Unit. It includes scenes of death and ruin, as well as coverage of Dachau taken shortly after its liberation. I mention this because it is often said that the war changed Stevens, and made it less easy for him to believe in entertainment. Was he a Sullivan who went too far to be comfortable again in Hollywood? The question is hard to answer. But something seems to have afflicted Stevens. He was never a great director. But in the thirties he had a feeling for fun, grace, and story. Thereafter, he was always somber—and sometimes heavier than that.

This falling off is all the sadder in view of Stevens's origins. Hal Roach hired him as gagman and, eventually, director for Laurel and Hardy. Once established, he made a string of pleasant pictures, usually with a comic emphasis and allowing special opportunities to actors. Alice Adams is still a major Katharine Hepburn film; Swing Time is classic Astaire and Rogers with Astaire's virtuoso Bojangles dance and one of the most mercurial of the intimate dance routines with Ginger, Pick Yourself Up; Quality Street, Vivacious Lady, Gunga Din, Penny Serenade, Woman of the Year, The Talk of the Town, and The More the Merrier all seem scarcely to belong to the laborious director of later years, dulled by overcraft. Woman of the Year, especialy, is an excellent emotional comedy that introduced Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and never lost the charge of feeling between ihern, even if it settles for a male chauvinist attitude. The Talk of the Town has unresolved echoes of Capra and Fury, too much piety toward the Supreme Court, and too great a willingness to keep Cary Grant in hiding while Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman talk.

The theory outlined above doesn't quite hold. I Remember Mama (48) is decent and very fond of the Bay Area, and A Place in the Sun (51) is a beautifully pessimistic love story, nearly rapturous in its treatment of Clift and Elizabeth Taylor and in its observation of their feelings for each other. Indeed, there is a gravitational pull toward death in the love scenes that is unashamed and subversive.

Of the rest, Shane (53) works because of a simple fable, the jeweled grandeur of the landscape, and the rapport between Alan Ladd and Brandon de Wilde. Giant (56) is bloated, seldom plausible, with actors who never settle into the story or the idea of Texas. The three films after that are strenuous disasters. Maybe Stevens was miscast as a maker of big pictures, and rather exposed when he had to take up the load of theme or ideas.

After all, in the thirties, he directed scripts, stories, projects, and stars that had built-in virtues. There have always been directors who were most generously used if asked to do no more. But maybe war and its horrors compelled Stevens into authorship and philosophy, things beyond his craft.