The New Pictures

Yellow Jack (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is by long odds the cinema season's most thrilling melodrama. Its scene: fever-racked Cuba after the Spanish-American War. Its vampire-villain is Aedes

(Stegomyia) aegypti, the yellow-fever mosquito. Its heroes are the men who braved mosquito bite to find an effective yellow-fever cure.

Yellow Jack's story goes from scientific detachment to taut drama, but always with a paucity of heroics, a leavening of lightness and brightness. Fashioned from the Sidney Howard-Paul de Kruif play of 1934. Edward Chodorov's cinema is firmly rooted in facts. It records, against a back-ground of Army life in Cuba, the defeat and heartbreak experienced in 1900 by General Leonard Wood (Jonathan Hale), Major William Crawford Gorgas (Henry O'Neill) and the commission headed by Major Walter Reed (Lewis Stone) in their long fight against the yellow peril. It makes no bones about pointing out that the eventually accepted solution, i.e., that the disease was spread by the Stegomyia mosquito, was something that a Havana physician, Dr. Carlos Finlay, had been saying in vain for 19 years. And it stamps as matter-of-fact, unassuming heroes the young doctor (Henry Hull) who died and the five volunteers who risked their lives to test the Finlay theory.

As the broguish, shrewdly philosophical Sergeant O'Hara of these volunteers, Cinemactor Robert Montgomery atones for much past preciousness, affirms what many cinemagoers discovered last year in Night Must Fall (TIME, May 10, 1937)--that he is an excellent actor. In his third cinema role, veteran Play Actor Charles Coburn (The Better 'Ole) gives a solid, bitter-edged portrayal of Dr. Carlos Finlay.

As Yellow Jack was being released last week, the Satevepost published a searching review of the yellow-fever problem entitled Yellow Jack Breaks Jail, by Physician Victor G. Heiser. Its discouraging findings were that the enigma of yellow fever has not yet, after all, been completely solved. Theory has been that the Aedes mosquito was the only carrier, and that the virus required a human host. But exhaustive research has since proved that the Aedes aegypti mosquito is not the only carrier, and that men are not the only hosts to the yellow fever virus; that it can be harbored by many other creatures (TIME, April 4).

What gave Dr. Heiser's article a further ominous ring was the expressed theory that the wide extension of airplane travel could bring about a renewed spread of yellow fever. His suggestions for prevention of a new epidemic: 1) consultation with health authorities in the construction of transport airplanes, to eliminate possible hiding places for the carrier or its larvae, and 2) utilization by airplane passengers of inoculation facilities.

The Great John Ericsson (A. B. Svensk Filmindustri). The screen rights to world history have so far been mostly claimed by Hollywood. Hollywood has revamped European history to fit its reels, whenever it was so minded. By the same token there is no reason why European cinema should not do likewise to U. S. events. The Great John Ericsson, a Swedish cinema invasion of the U. S. Civil War, shows the way. The story credits the saving of the Union to the prowess of Swedish Inventor Ericsson's armored, cheesebox-on-a-raft Gunboat Monitor, and to Swedish Gunner Karl Fetterson, who stuffs the Monitor's, guns with double loads of powder, blasts the formidable Confederate Ram Merrimac out of Hampton Roads.

What may disconcert U. S. cinemagoers even more than this implied minimizing of such homegrown history makers as Grant, Sherman, et al., is the fact that Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, not to mention a grinning corps of Tom-show blacks and characters named Mallory and Kerrigan, all speak Swedish. Only exception: Abraham Lincoln, who is reproduced briefly and accurately, but keeps mum.

John Ericsson is well and faithfully played by veteran Cinemactor-Director Victor Seastrom, whose sojourn as a Hollywood director (1923-31) produced such works as He Who Gets Slapped, The Scarlet Letter, Wind. But though it is a lifelike portrait of a man, its battle scenes and political involvements are as preposterous as the pictures in history books.

The Great John Ericsson arrived in the U. S. with a ten-minute foreword by Count Folke Bernadotte, nephew of King Gustav V, making clear its mission for good will on the occasion of the Swedish-American Tercentenary Celebration. In the spring of 1638 the first Swedish settlers landed on the banks of the Delaware River. The high spots of SwedishAmerican relationships since have been recorded for the Tercentenary in an eye-filling folio entitled Fran Delaware till Garbo.

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