The New Pictures

Men With Wings (Paramount) is the first Technicolor picture with an aeronautical background. It is also the first picture with an aeronautical background that attempts to take the long view of flying, not as hazardous profession or exciting adventure but as the latest and most spectacular chapter in the long history of transport. Starting with the Wright Brothers' first, incredible, 59-second hop, Men With Wings proceeds, with great pictorial beauty and praiseworthy attention to authenticity, to run through the whole amazing chronicle of aviation. For its intention and for its photographic content the picture deserves to rank as one of the year's most important productions. Were the narrative, the writing and the acting in Men With Wings up to the same standard, it would rank as one of the best pictures ever made. Unfortunately, they are not.

Properly impressed by the dramatic fact that people who were children in 1903 had barely reached middle age by the time Franco's bombers were pounding Barcelona, Director Wellman, who helped concoct his own story, tried to reflect the whole bright saga of flying through the prism of a conventional triangle plot. When Pat Falconer, Scott Barnes and Peggy Ranson are moppets, sailing kites in imitation of the airship Peggy's inventor father is trying to rig up in his workshop, the device succeeds brilliantly. By the time the children have grown up into Fred MacMurray, Ray Milland and Louise Campbell, the narration of their story seems a tediously oblique fashion of presenting material which would make almost any purely personal romance seem drab by comparison. Net result is proof that the cinema, less complete as an art than aeronautics as a science, has not in its parallel career reached the point of being able to present facts as facts instead of sugar-coating them with fiction.

The shortcomings of Men With Wings are not due to Director William Augustus ("Wild Bill") Wellman's lack of qualifications for his job. A Lafayette Flying Corps pilot during the War, he launched aviation as a major cinema subject with Wings in 1927, thereafter rated as one of the industry's top specialists in aviation epics. More lately his forte has been screwball comedies (Nothing Sacred). To Wellman these apparently dissimilar types seem closely connected. The extraordinary conduct of Pat Falconer in Men With Wings illustrates his belief that Wartime fliers experienced such intense emotional turmoil that none of them afterwards could adjust themselves to normal living.

An even better illustration of this belief is Wellman's own career. Respectably reared in quiet Brookline, Mass., he left high school to sell chocolates and woolen goods, failing miserably at both. After the War he went to Hollywood, persuaded Douglas Fairbanks to give him a job acting in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo. After William Wellman took one good look at himself on the screen he decided he was an even worse actor than salesman, became a messenger boy for Samuel Goldwyn. When General Pershing was being shown around the lot one day he spied Wellman, whom he had known when Wellman and Poloist Tommy Hitchcock were famed for their trick of flying low over German towns and firing their machine guns at church bells. Said Pershing: "Why, Bill, you old son of a gun, how are you?" Next day Wellman was made an assistant director.

In Hollywood, a nut community, Wellman is famed as one of the nuts that hang highest on the tree. Most Hollywood celebrities like plural marriages and practical jokes. Wellman has been married four times and his type of ribbing, in more sedate circles, would probably get him arrested. When directing a picture Wellman's technique of showing his actors what to do stops barely short of assault & battery. A favorite Hollywood joke is to put an electric wire in a chair to shock the occupant. On a Wellman set the furniture often has enough voltage to fit into the decor of the Sing Sing death house, and when Wellman gives a visitor a hot foot it amounts to arson.

Wellman directed the best gangster picture (Public Enemy) and the best color picture (A Star is Born). He likes color so much that he plans to use it exclusively henceforth. Last week, returning from a Bermuda holiday, he found Paramount executives groaning that business was bad. Said Wellman: "I'll tell you how to save some money. Fire me." His present salary: about $200,000 a year. His next picture for Paramount will be The Light That Failed.

The Citadel, made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Denham, England, and Young Dr. Kildare, made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, follow A Man To Remember (TIME, Oct. 24) in this year's cinema cycle about doctors. When the cinema last became agitated about aches and pains, the hero of every other picture, armed to the teeth with lancets and scalpels, wore masks and bed sheets like a Kleagle. The latest crop of cinema doctors are physicians, not surgeons. Though rarely polite, they seem industrious and kindly, more addicted to the pillbox than the hack saw.

In The Citadel, adapted from A. J. Cronin's autobiographical best seller and directed by King Vidor, the hero (Robert Donat) is an earnest young Scottish physician married to a South Wales school-teacher (Rosalind Russell) and determined to improve the lot of the miners whom he is hired to treat. If The Citadel reflects credit on its hero, it is caustic to his colleagues. Few of them take much interest in his altruistic attitude. Presently, disgusted young Dr. Manson organizes a rich London practice, engages in discreet fee splitting with other prosperous quacks and has to be read out of the profession before he can regain his personal integrity.

The central character (Lew Ayres) of Young Dr. Kildare is in some respects Dr. Manson's U. S. counterpart. Scrambling about a Manhattan hospital to see where he can do the most good, Dr. Kildare encounters his full quota of mercenary internes and self-important specialists, but he is also privileged to deal with Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore) who, old, morose and dying of cancer, is still all that a great diagnostician should be. Voting Dr. Kildare ends in somewhat inconclusive fashion, permitting cinemaddicts to suppose that its hero will be running his own clinic in the next installment.

As advertisements for the profession they investigate, neither The Citadel nor Young Dr. Kildare is in a class with A Man To Remember. As entertainment both may be recommended, particularly The Citadel, which will be a strong and beneficial dose for thoughtful hypochondriacs.

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