As something of an antidote to the triple-whammy suffering of the Stella Dallas/Imitation of Life double-bill on September 2 (from which you should all be recovered by now), we've brought out a sparkling new Library of Congress print of John Cromwell's Ann Vickers. It's absolutely uncharacteristic of the thirties woman's picture in the overt power it gives to the independent professional-no "back street" sufferer in the shadows she. Astonishingly, the movie version kept Sinclair Lewis' racy plot more-or-less intact, perhaps because RKO was loath to tamper with a well-known best-seller and Lewis' first novel after winning the Nobel Prize. But the result of compressing the 550-page novel about prison reform and women's rights into a 73-minute movie was to turn social consciousness into melodrama-and an ideal vehicle for Irene Dunne. Surely her character is unique in Hollywood film for having an abortion and an illegitimate child and living happily ever after. More than that, the unrepentant female sexuality outside marriage as an element in moral growth makes Ann Vickers unique in my experience of pre-sixties Hollywood. Against this progressive pattern, admittedly, is her air of nervous dissatisfaction with a brilliant career as author and reformist prison warden. Enter Walter Huston.... Scott Simmon