Unpulled Punches

With their foreign market already lost, the movies are getting pretty reckless. They say "Nazi" and "Fascist" and "Ribbentrop" as easily as if they were the names of cocktails. In line with this spirit of adventure, Hollywood showed up last week with a document, a drama, a comedy, none of which pulls its punches when it mentions the new order in Europe, all of which are better for their courage.

The World In Flames (Paramount) is prefaced with the statement that it is a picture of the struggle of a free people against a colossus of death. Thereafter it slips into a staccato review of political and diplomatic events from 1929 to 1940 with a string of old newsreel clips. Because many of the shots have been cut to the point where the effect is almost kaleidoscopic, the film loses the nostalgic force of a family album, which is always an attraction in resurrections of old movie scenes. But Paramount intended something else. It wanted to show the inevitable drift toward war during the '30s by skipping from country to country each year, contrasting the opulence at the beginning of the decade with the poverty of the later years, the comfort of the democracies with the misery of the dictatorships, the peace and indifference of the haves with the militant fever of the havenots. The film takes no chances on letting the audience forget the fact that the irresistible note of doom runs through every shot of men marching, men striking, men fighting.

Italy carries away top honors in The World in Flames with three picture-stealing scenes. The first shows bearded Count Dino Grandi on a visit to Washington in 1931 announcing that "Italy-a wants-a peace-a. Italy-a wants-a cooperation-a anda understanding-a amonga all-a the nations-a of the world-a." The second is Mussolini standing on a speaker's platform puffing, pouting and pleased over the cheers of his people. The third reproduces one of the most tragic and dramatic moments in modern history--Haile Selassie pleading for aid before the League of Nations to the whistles and catcalls of the Italian delegation.

John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (United Artists) is a dreamy, reverent screen translation of four one-act plays about the sea by Eugene O'Neill. Preceded by enthusiastic rumors heralding it as the best picture since The Informer, it opened in the situation of a celebrated home-run hitter going to bat with the bases loaded and two out in the ninth inning. That it failed to clear the bases is as much the fault of its advance rooters as it is of the film. Director Ford filled it with respectful piety for the hard impersonality of the sea. In doing so he built 103 minutes of photoplay around a simple character study of the S.S. Glencairn, a slow tramp steamer bound from the West Indies to Britain with a cargo of munitions. During most of the voyage, slight, sensitive Photographer Gregg Toland's camera is turned on the seamen who inhabit the forecastle--a burly, brawling Irishman (Thomas Mitchell); a big, boneheaded Swede (John Wayne) who wants to quit the sea and live on a farm with his mother, and a timid little one who looks after him (John Qualen); a dipsomaniacal, upper-class Englishman (Ian Hunter) trying to forget his shoddy past--also on a grim, gruff captain (Wilfrid Lawson). There is no sustained plot to occupy the men, only sporadic incidents such as a battering storm at sea, a drunken rumpus in a West Indian port with a bevy of native girls, a tingling passage through the war zone, a long-drawn debauch in London's waterfront pubs and brothels. For those whose interest in the sea is less intense than John Ford's, the endless incidents aboard ship without benefit of plot may seem to drag in spite of honest acting, deft direction, superb photography and Richard Hageman's salty musical score. Best shot: the Glencairn's crew plastered prone on the ship's deck, with only the roar of Stukas, the splash of bombs on the water, the splatter of machine-gun bullets on the white canvas to indicate a Nazi bombing raid.

Arise, My Love (Paramount) turns the neat trick of setting a comedy against the background of current events in Europe. Its principal device is to hustle a carefree American aviator (Irish-born Ray Milland) and a beauteous American reporter (French-born Claudette Colbert) through a series of romantic interludes spiced with lines whose moral and political implications would have made the Hays office of a year ago writhe in righteous indignation. While Milland is escaping from a Spanish prison camp, drinking with Miss Colbert in Paris just prior to the outbreak of war, and making love in the forest of Compiegne during the signing of the armistice with Hitler, some of the season's funniest lines and most censorable situations are unreeled. Examples: Explaining to Colbert why she is just his type, Milland remarks that she reminds him of a stewardess on an airliner he used to pilot in the U. S. "We made a trip once," he explains, "and there weren't any passengers aboard. That's how I lost my commercial license." Before he leaves the prison camp, Milland tells the commanding officer about a rat in his cell--"a very intelligent rat, so I named him Adolf and taught him how to give the Nazi salute."

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