The New Pictures

Test Pilot (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

The job of a test pilot is to put new airplanes through stunts and strains they may never have to perform or withstand in normal use. This testing sometimes involves diving a ship at such terrific speed that leveling off causes it to break apart in midair. The pilot is then expected to bail out with his recorded observations. If a test pilot ends his career alive, he is considered lucky. Test Pilot'?, flying shots are among the best ever staged by cinema. But the picture is less concerned with the mechanics of test flying than it is with how test pilots and those about them live and act.

Its thoughtful story, by Lieut. Commander Frank Wead (Ceiling Zero, China Clipper), conceives two sodden-nerved men, one a swaggering, hard-living and egotistic pilot (Clark Gable), the other his patient, understanding mechanic (Spencer Tracy). On the fear-tortured mind of the flyer's wife (Myrna Loy) their almost brutal fatalism rasps like a file. Credit for blending this grounded mental conflict with the melodrama of wings in the air, screaming struts and whining motors goes to Director Victor Fleming (Captains Courageous). Not the least of his accomplishments was to exact performances that verge on reality from pert, actressy Myrna Loy and loud, slam-bang Clark Gable. From amenable, sandy Spencer Tracy, currently cinema's No. 1 actors' actor, Director Fleming got what he wanted without coaxing.

The Pearls of the Crown (Serge Sandberg) behaves oddly by: 1) speaking in three languages, 2) popping up in unexpected places all over the face of the world, and 3) flitting back & forth over the last four centuries with the fervor of a flea at a dog show. More upstart than experiment, Pearls of the Crown is a capricious use of cinema's ample elbow room for the somersaulting imagination and talents of 53-year-old French Stagecrafter Sacha Guitry, who wrote its story, directed it and played four of its leading parts.

The legend of the four huge, tear-shaped pearls that hang from the cross pieces of the British imperial State crown is that they were once Queen Elizabeth's earrings. Taking off from that point, Fabulist Guitry weaves "a veritable fairy tale, the most imaginative passages of which will seem real--perhaps." In the ensuing series of pseudohistorical blackouts, some are naively satirical, others playfully sexy, others plain stodgy. But each is braced up with a neat jigger of the Guitry imp, combines to form a razzle-dazzle of fact & fancy that any cinemagoer should enjoy if he can curb that impulse to rush out and consult a history book.

It is the Guitry fancy that the pearls were originally seven. In telling how their number was reduced to four, Sacha Guitry puts on the greatest parade of kings, ministers and great ladies ever assembled on stage or screen. He himself plays Francis I of France and Napoleon III. His wife, Jacqueline Delubac, is Mary Queen of Scots and the Empress Josephine. Of the rest Veteran Actor Lyn Harding's Henry VIII is brief but good, Actor Ermete Zacconi's Clement VII is great.

Best blackout: the climax, in which the last of the three extra pearls, accidentally dropped overboard from the Normandie by Actor Guitry, skitters right back into an oyster.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.