The New Pictures

Women in War (Republic). Elsie Janis thoroughly enjoyed World War I. As soon as the U. S. was well in, the veteran actress, who since the age of five had been entertaining audiences with mimicry and handsprings, dashed off to France to entertain the doughboys. How she did it she later told with much gusto in her autobiography, So Far, So Good! "From the fuss that the fellows made over me, I'm sure they thought I must be at least the American edition of Bernhardt. Imagine their surprise when my performance consisted of telling stories filled with hells and damns. . . " The former Sweetheart of the A. E. F. devoted the ensuing years of peace to marrying Actor Gilbert Wilson, getting herself nearly killed in an automobile accident, turning deeply religious, settling down in California, where one day she popped into the minds that make Republic pictures.

That thrifty, busy studio, whose staple is westerns and whose fingers are close to the popular pulse, had a hunch. They decided to make a war picture, and thought of Elsie Janis. They also ran into unexpected opposition. In 1939 war did not seem as much fun to Actress Janis as in 1917. She agreed to play in a war picture on condition that she approved the script and that she be permitted to remark from time to time during the film that war is gruesome. She even objected when Director John Auer told her how to remark it.

"She has a mind of her own," says the studio. By the time this difficulty had been ironed out, together with the problems of some 20 other female players who watched each other on the set like cats, Women in War was ready for release. It could not have been better timed.

The picture itself is somewhat less sensational than its timing. Its plot is almost as involved as a peace treaty. Cinemactress Janis is Nurse O'Neil, who stalks around rather weirdly as the hardboiled, softhearted head of a female nursing unit at the front. She has had a past and it bobs up early in the picture in the highly attractive form of her equally hard-boiled daughter, Nurse Pamela (Wendy Barrie). Pamela has just inadvertently killed a popular drunken officer by pushing him through a balustrade. She turns nurse to make amends. Pamela does not know that Nurse O'Neil, whom she detests, is her mother. This discovery, the picture's climax, is effected with the help of a bang-up barrage which smashes to smithereens some valuable Republic sets of a French village, showers the cute and cowering nurses with dirt and plaster, but does not faze Elsie Janis.

Cinemaddicts who witnessed the architectural carnage thought Women in War was no Big Parade, but looked ominously like the start of one.

Brother Orchid (Warner). The making of movies is ringed about by taboos. But no commercial taboo is quite so terrifying as religious touchiness. Nevertheless, Hollywood has never been able to master an occasional whim to toy with the dangerous topic of religion. Brother Orchid is such a toying. It celebrates the spiritual regeneration of Edward G. Robinson (a gangster) by monastic life.

In the first (and funniest) part of the picture, Robinson is frog-mouthed, rasp-voiced, bigheaded Little John Sarto, who turns over his rackets to the boys when he goes off to Europe "to get class." His subsequent attempts to re-muscle in on the business leave Little John full of lead in front of a Floracian monastery run by Donald Crisp.

In the second (and more sweetly solemn) part, Gangster Sarto becomes Brother Orchid, a novice. If Brother Orchid has ever thought of the golden rule it was as something he might filch. The self-enjoined poverty of his brother monks baffles him. He wonders what their racket is. Soon he performs miracles. He miraculously increases the milk supply by spiking the milk pump with water. As a reward, the unworldly brothers give him "a zinnia garden all his own" to tend. His gardening is as miraculous as his milking: he catnaps under a flower bench while a hired boy hoes the zinnias. In the end the system gets him.

Brother Orchid is at its rollicking best when Little John Sarto is haranguing his henchmen on the tactlessness of murder, when as a hard-boiled innocent abroad he loses his stuffed shirt to smoother European sharpers, or when he is the unresponding object of Ann Sothern's adroitly dumb adorations. There is fast gang melodrama when Little John is purg ing his erstwhile pal (Humphrey Bogart).

But when the picture begins to get re ligion, Hollywood becomes so scared at its own temerity that comedy flies out the monastery window. Brother Orchid ends on an implausible note of dead-serious redemption.

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