The New Pictures

Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) is one of the least kinetic and one of the most absorbing of cinema's innumerable treatments of the World War. Concerned not with fighting but with respite from fighting, it investigates a group of French inmates of a German prison camp. The prisoners--principally an austere patrician, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), his mechanic, Marechal (Jean Gabin), and a generous fellow, Rosenthal (Dalio), who shares the canned delicacies sent by his rich family--naturally try to escape. Director Renoir, however, builds his plot, not around the success or failure of this enterprise, but around their relations with each other, with their guards, with the gloomy German officer, von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) in whose fortress they are finally interned.

Many war pictures have dwelt, for purposes of irony, on the small gallantries of modern armed conflict. Grand Illusion does the same thing, but for a different reason. This time the monstrous irony is war itself rather than the lie de Boeldieu tells to save his friends, the flower that von Rauffenstein places on de Boeldieu's chest after shooting him through the stomach. For the heroics of ordinary war pictures, Grand Illusion substitutes a pastoral interlude when Marechal and Rosenthal try to escape to Switzerland, and a German peasant woman shelters them on her lonely farm. The pastoral ends. A border patrol fires at the two fugitives in the snow. The shrill ring of the shots is the more shocking because they seem--as Director Renoir wishes to make war seem--completely out of place, too horrible to be more than an illusion.

Superbly acted, with English titles to translate its polyglot dialogue, Grand Illusion's principal defect is that an occasional exaggerated attention to detail tends to retard its pace. It is notable for restoring Erich von Stroheim (a top-priced director until a combination of extravagant pictures and his own erratic temperament cut short his Hollywood career) to the screen in a more sympathetic role than those he used to play. Good shot: the moment at the dress rehearsal of a prison show when the first member of the cast tries on a woman's dress.

Too Hot to Handle (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a brisk occupational comedy-melodrama investigating the hazards, practical and emotional, of the newsreel industry. As a guide to young men seeking a career that will combine adventure and desirable social contacts with high financial rewards, Too Hot to Handle can be dismissed as foolishly overenthusiastic. As entertainment--lavishly produced by Laurence Weingarten, compactly written by Laurence Stallings and John Lee Mahin, directed at breakneck speed by Jack Conway--it can be heartily recommended.

For cinematic purposes, newsreel photography has, over other equally exciting pursuits, the advantage of dovetailing with its medium. Producer Weingarten has utilized this to the best advantage. Too Hot to Handle exhibits its hero (Clark Gable) in the act of shooting a film of Alma Harding (Myrna Loy) as she arrives in China with a plane full of cholera serum. His reel is sensational because, in making it, Mr. Gable forces Miss Loy to wreck her plane. (In one of the takes for this scene, Miss Loy was trapped in the burning plane's cabin, had to be rescued in earnest by Mr. Gable.) Apologetic but not penitent, Gable pretends to destroy the film. It remains to plague him through frame after frame of realistic action. By the time Myrna Loy has saved Gable's job by direct appeal to his boss, snubbed his arch rival, quarreled with him, and, unknowingly, accepted his aid in an effort to find a brother lost in a South American jungle, Too Hot to Handle has done too full justice to its subject.

No picture for double features because of its length (106 min.), it should persuade even cinemaddicts who are sour on newsreels that they would do well to give Graham McNamee one more chance. Good shot: picture within a picture, when Miss Loy sees the newsreel Clark Gable has pretended to destroy, at a Manhattan preview.

Hold That Co-ed (Twentieth Century-Fox) can be regarded either as a football comedy with overtones of political satire or as a satirical fantasy about the career of the late Huey Long with overtones of campus comedy. It lives up to football comedy better than to political satire because even that small portion of the Long career which the film considers is too strange for fiction.

Taking Governor Gabby Harrigan (John Barrymore) at the height of his campaign for a seat in the U. S. Senate, Hold that Co-ed shows him publicizing himself by lavishing money on State College, making its football team the best in the country. The rest of the picture divides its time between the brilliant comic improvisation of the greatest Hamlet of his era as a bibulous, backslapping, vote-getting genius and a painfully routine ro mance between a homespun football coach (George Murphy) and the Governor's amiable secretary (Marjorie Weaver). Typical shot: Gabby Harrigan, having agreed to let the outcome of his Senatorial race depend on the big game gloomily watching State's fabulously effective girl dropkicker (Joan Davis) miss a crucial field goal.

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