The New Pictures

That Night in Rio (20th Century-Fox) provides a parallelogram in inter-American relations. A U. S. nightclub entertainer (Don Ameche) is romancing a Brazilian cutie (Carmen Miranda) who performs in the same show. Patrons of the nightclub are Baron Duarte (also Don Ameche) a rich Brazilian broker and his pretty, plumpish wife (Alice Faye). When their quadrangular paths intersect, the foursome gets its identities tangled, temporarily crosses its affections. The complications, jealousies and comedy which accompany this Technicolored treatise on Pan-American flirtation are highly significant diplomatically. That Night in Rio is the first rose tossed by Hollywood in its current attempt to woo South America via the movies.

It all started last summer with the founding of the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics, headed by Nelson Rockefeller. Looking to the cinema as a potent field for propaganda Rockefeller established a Motion Picture Division. Wise choice to handle this division was hard-working Jock Whitney who has made his Long Island fortune speak Hollywood s language in two profitable ventures--Technicolor and Selznick International. In Hollywood it is chic to know Jock, who plays six-goal polo and owns a racing stable, a privilege to do business with him.

Jock organized Hollywood like lightning. Calling together the production heads of the studios, he told them his plan said he hoped they would try to eliminate offensive Latin Americans from their pictures--the lazy louts, the greasy villains the slimy gigolos. Next he suggested they try to sprinkle their schedules with films that would appeal to the South American market, films that also gave a pleasant picture of life in the U. S. Perhaps, he added hopefully, they might send their stars south of the border now & then to drum up a little good will for the industry and the nation. The producers organized a group of advisory committees composed of Hollywood specialists. Examples: Committee on Visits to South America ,Committee on South American Film Facilities (to seek added outlets, encourage location trips there), Committee on Story Material (to dig up stories interesting to South America).

For That Night in Rio, Producer Darryl Zanuck sent an outline of the story to the Brazilian embassy in Washington for approval and suggestions before shooting started, consulted with the Whitney Committee's committees in Hollywood kept an expert handy on the set.

The Picture emerges as a dazzlingly colored musical wheeze sparkled only by the sporadic appearances of Carmen Miranda, the lively, liver-lipped singer and diaphragm dancer who came to Broadway two years ago in The Streets of Paris. Only the plushiest side of life in Rio is shown--the expansive interior of a great nightclub tall, draped and mirrored rooms of the Baron's house, the modernistic interior of the Rio Stock Exchange. In these settings, Brazilian life seems polite and well-dressed, constantly accompanied by an ordinary assortment of Mack Gordon-Harry Warren tunes sung against a background of beautiful girls. Of the Brazilian characters, only the Baron's rival broker (J. Carrol Naish) has a trace of perfidy and that is gently masked. Since Miss Faye as the Baroness with a brush of Brooklyn in her accent prefers the Latin Don Ameche to the U. S. duplicate, and since the U S Ameche prefers Carmen Miranda, Pan-American attraction is adequately proved. That Night in Rio should convince Latins that the yanquis are trying to be good albeit slightly dreamy and gushing, neighbors. If they want other evidence, they can look forward to Robert Taylor in The Life of Simon Bolivar, Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand and R. K. O.'s They Met in Argentina, coming Hollywood productions inspired by Mr. Whitney's non-compulsory suggestions.

Rage in Heaven (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Taken from an eight-year-old novel by James Hilton, the film puts Robert Montgomery back in his English squire's tweeds as the respectable owner of a humming steel mill. Soon married to his mother's charming young companion (Ingrid Bergman), he begins to exhibit slight traces of eccentricity-- an inordinate jealousy of his best friend (George Sanders), a shivering horror of the moon, a tormenting fear complex. But it is never brash. As he hesitatingly proposes to Miss Bergman in the warm evening under the oaks of his estate, or questioningly accepts her affection after their marriage, he makes the agonized audience want to shake him to his senses, force him to accept his happiness. Unable to do so, it must watch his psychosis swell until he drives off his wife, plans a revenge which frames a murder charge on Sanders.

Directed by grey, crop-haired Major W. S. ("Woody") Van Dyke II, U. S. M. C., Rage in Heaven is the kind of swift, smooth whodunit which Hollywood can achieve by letting its good performers perform without unnecessary interference. Well fitted for such free rein is Swedish-born Ingrid Bergman, who makes a patterned ingenue role as important as many a prima donna's meatiest dramatic excursion.

The fresh, unpainted moon face of Ingrid Bergman, which seems to turn up at all the extremities, is new but already familiar to U. S. cinemaddicts. In 1939, on a hurried trip to Hollywood, she made Intermezzo; and all Hollywood learned about her was that she was tall (5 ft., 8 in.), shy, had a husband and a baby named Pia back home in Stockholm.

The next winter she returned, debarked with Pia sleeping in a fur-lined papoose bag slung over her shoulder. This time people learned she is so sensitive she blushes and buries her face in her hands when she blows a line. Before the camera she becomes so intense her stomach often rumbles nervously. Currently occupied as the saloon tart in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she reports: "It's a nice change. You know, in Hollywood it's like being in a cage; they thrust the parts through the bars, and you take what they give you."

Lately, Ingrid has been leading the prognosticators' poll for the part of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Her most enthusiastic booster is Author Ernest Hemingway himself, who autographed her copy of the novel with: "To Ingrid Bergman, who is the Maria of this book."

Buck Privates

(Universal) is one of those cheap Hollywood offerings ($350,000) which startle even their closest friends with huge returns (present guesstimate: $1,000,000). It also gives audiences a satisfactory opportunity to appraise the talents of Broadway Comics Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, a new pair of old-school comedians full of blackface repartee and Mack Sennett slapstick.

As accidental volunteers, Abbott and Costello trundle off to a streamlined Army camp which, if believed, may start a flood of enlistments. Among a bevy of well-tailored hostesses are the Andrews Sisters, who swing their tunes at regular intervals, a standard ingenue (Jane Frazee), who helps militarize a misfit from the Social Register (Lee Bowman). But the principal shenanigans belong to Abbott and Costello, who are rumored to have evoked an imperial laugh from Charlie Chaplin at a private Hollywood screening. With lean Mr. Abbott feeding lines to porky Mr. Costello, they sometimes sound like a breath of Joe Miller ("Those bags are too much for you. Why don't you get a red cap?" "What's the matter with the hat I got on?"), sometimes make the laughs roll loud with their masterful pantomiming (learning how to drill, shooting craps).

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