The New Pictures

Lights Out in Europe (Kline). In the war-sultry May of 1939 a short, heavyset, peaceful-looking young American bought steamship tickets for Europe and began to pack his motion picture camera equipment. He smelled fighting in the air.

While frightened tourists headed back to the U. S., Herbert Kline headed for trouble. He had already made one documentary film in Europe--Crisis (TIME, March 20, 1939), to which critics had taken off their hats. That film was about Munich and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. It had looked like war then, but war had not come. This time Director Kline was sure war was coming. He was even sure where it would come first--in the Polish Corridor.

Leaving his ace Czech cameraman, Alexander Hackensmid, in England to film the last spasms of pre-war civilian life there. Kline and his wife hurried to Poland. As the last hours of peace ran out, the Klines photographed the reactions of average Poles and the frantic defense preparations of the Polish Army. In Danzig another Kline cameraman photographed Nazi doings.

After Sept. 1 the Klines retreated along with armies of Polish refugees and soldiers.

They cranked their cameras as they went.

Every day they were strafed by German planes which would swoop as low as 15 feet, machine-gunning refugees, who made targets of themselves by running. The Klines lay flat, eventually got all their film and equipment out of Poland via Riga, Latvia.

Back in the U. S. Director Kline, fed up with warring Europe, never wanted to see it again. While they projected a film about Mexican Indians, for which John Steinbeck will do the script, Kline and Hackensmid cut and edited Lights Out in Europe.

The Picture. Last week Director Kline showed his picture. Novelist James Hilton (Goodbye, Mr. Chips} had supplied a simple, moving commentary read by Cinemactor Fredric March. For those who cannot experience war at first hand, the next best thing is to see Lights Out in Europe.

It begins in England when war with Germany was only a weekly scare and not an hourly terror. It shows war overtaking children. The snout-nosed gas mask appears. For infants too small for the mask, there is the gasproof container. There are shots of a terrified baby being forced into a container, staring through its big glass pane in panic as he is sealed in. In their back yards people construct flimsy-looking air-raid shelters, decorate them with potted plants.

On the other side of Europe Danzig fills with truckloads of Hitler's jaunty armed "tourists." German ships bring in harmless-looking cargoes--arms. Across the main square of the old Baltic port Propaganda Minister Goebbels trips like an absurd gnome in a great coat that reaches his heels.

On Sept. 1, the Nazis invade Poland.

The Polish roads are crammed with the piled carts of fleeing peasants. They pass Polish cavalry going against German motorized forces, horses dragging anti-tank guns. Across the fields refugees run desperately carrying whatever they can. Desperately they pile on trains. Sometimes German planes machine-gun the trains. There are gruesome shots of a young Polish woman clutching the train seat in her death spasm, a father shot through chest and abdomen sitting helplessly between his hopeless wife and frightened, bewildered little girl.

Sometimes the peasants stand around their ruined homes. Pathetic shots show old peasant women futilely pouring buckets of water on mountainous heaps of lavalike embers, once their houses. Sometimes they stare at the burst carcasses of cattle burned alive. A woman stirs with her bare foot a half-burned sheep, then covers her eyes with her hands and weeps.

There are prayers in the open and upraised faces.

Everywhere the skies are full of planes, in the east German planes, in the west German, French and British planes. In the west none of the big powers feels strong enough to begin a mass aerial attack. The planes reconnoitre and threaten, the people fear. "This represented the impasse," says the commentator as the camera spots the reconnoitering planes, "which European civilization had reached." For Americans this is the picture's high point. The British boy soldiers seen off to war by the cripples of World War I, the panorama shots of the vast cemeteries of World War I, just underline this fact.

Lights Out in Europe is as negative as all peace propaganda, which can never do more than repeat parrotwise what every adult knows--that war is horrible. But for Americans who wish to think with the utmost realism about Europe's war, Lights Out in Europe is important because it lets them live through one hour of the real thing.

A Bill of Divorcement (RKO). In the frenetic '20s Clemence Dane's post-Ibsenish play about hereditary insanity made timid souls peer into the tangled branches of their family trees. Later they anxiously saw the play made into a movie with John Barrymore as the demented musician-father who recovers inopportunely and not too convincingly. Twittery Billie Burke was his divorced wife, whose plans for remarriage his sudden recovery almost wrecks at the altar. Katharine Hepburn (in her first picture) was his philoprogenitive daughter, who, distrustful of her own "nerves," jilts her fiance, resolves to forego childbearing and devote her celibate future to her father.

Dated as the theory on which it is based, the old drama has lost much of its power to terrify, little of its power as a well-made play. As such, it gives its cast their first meaty parts in many a long day. Adolphe Menjou is appropriately disheveled, tense and staccato as lunatic Father Hilary. Fay Bainter drifts through the role of the distracted mother with a certain button-eyed bewilderment. Lacking Cinemactress Hepburn's virile stride, Cinemactress Maureen O'Hara also lacks some of the neural stridency that made Hepburn effective. But Maureen O'Hara is just as resolutely eugenic and more tender. As the divorced mother's fiance, Herbert Marshall makes his usual gracious, slightly irritated impression of a man who by a supreme act of will has just mastered a sudden visceral pang. Dame May Whitty is unpleasant Aunt Hester.

In the Barrymore-Hepburn version, the final scene with Hilary and his daughter thumping the piano together in a state of incipient euphoria used to leave audiences in tears. The present version, played by Cinemactress O'Hara with wild-eyed abandon, leaves cinemaddicts with an uneasy feeling that Dr. Alliot (C. Aubrey Smith) henceforth will do well to keep his eye on the daughter as well as her father.

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