The New Pictures

To Be Or Not To Be (Korda; United Artists) is the late Carole Lombard's last picture. Like Son of the Sheik (Rudolph Valentino), Steamboat 'Round the Bend (Will Rogers) and Saratoga (Jean Harlow), it was posthumously released. Fortunately for all concerned, To Be is a very funny comedy, salted to taste with melodrama and satire.

In Ninotchka, Director Ernst Lubitsch deliciously kidded the vagaries of the Soviets; in To Be he succeeds-as Hollywood had not yet done-in deftly ridiculing Hitler and his Nazis. His story is an actor's-eye-view of the Nazi occupation of Poland. As the Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne of Warsaw's Polski troupe, the Turas (Jack Benny and Miss Lombard) are a brittle couple. Their favorite soliloquy is Hamlet's To be, or not to be. . . . He likes to deliver it because it flatters his ego, at length; she likes it because it gives her time to entertain her male admirers backstage.

The temperamental Turas fit perfectly into the stock company's plot to keep information from the Gestapo that would wreck the Polish underground movement. She dallies with the informer (Stanley Ridges), who dies melodramiably onstage as his killers raise the curtain on their bombed and abandoned theater; he undertakes the role of his life by impersonating the dead spy. He is doing well when his vanity pricks him to ask the Gestapo head his opinion of Tura, the pre-war actor. Growls the Gestapoman: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland."

What the Polski company does to the Gestapo is first-rate entertainment- thanks to a score of good performances by the cast, fresh dialogue and plot (authored by Lubitsch and Melchior Lengyel) and the sure, saucy, suspenseful Lubitsch direction. Miss Lombard's natural, likable, vibrant performance is up to her standard. Mr. Benny, who plays his role straight, doesn't need his prop stogies to be funny.

Slick sequence : escaping to England in Hitler's private transport plane, which they have impersonated their way into, the Polish actors invite Hitler's pilots to leave the controls and come into the cabin for a word with the phony Fuehrer. They heil the impersonator and intone: "Yes, mein Fuehrer." Pointing to the open cabin door, he commands: "Jump!" Without hesitation or parachutes, they jump.

The Invaders (Columbia) is a Made-in-England propaganda film so crowded with talent that it can afford to use such notables as Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey and Laurence Olivier as bit players. Eighteen months in the making, it is more skillful as cinema than as propaganda.

Six survivors of the crew of the U-37, a Nazi submarine sunk by air bombs in Canadian waters, run a marathon across Canada (Hudson Bay to Alberta). One (Eric Portman) goes the distance; the others are killed or captured along the way. The survivor becomes, prematurely, the darling of the Nazi radio ("one Nazi against 11,000,000 Canadians"); a lone Canadian Army private (Mr. Massey), fed up with guarding the Chippawa Canal, polishes the Nazi off in democratic fashion (fists) before he can reach the sanctuary of U.S. soil.

This gantlet-run through the wilderness is the thread on which the picture's propa ganda pearls are strung. Best of them is a notable performance by Anton Walbrook as head of a Hutterite sect, of Germanic origin, who practice a kind of Christian communism in Canada's vast wheatlands. To Lieut. Portman's guttural plea that the Hutterites join their Nazi brothers in the war for Nordic supremacy, the leader replies: "Most of us are Germans, but we are not your brothers!"

As a decadent democrat against "one armed superman," purring Leslie Howard, talkily proficient, bags a Nazi. French-Canadian Trapper Olivier is less fortunate -the Nazis kill him. Invaders' star, Nazi Portman, is so good that his performance almost destroys the film's propaganda value. He and his arrogant, tough, single-purposed band struggle so well against such long odds that they become sympathetic instead of repulsive. By contrast, their democratic conquerors seem soft and befuddled.

Mister V (Small; United Artists) will not fool even the dunces in the back row. Its producer-director-star, airy Leslie Howard, played the same leading role seven years ago in The Scarlet Pimpernel. Then he was an 18th-Century English lord, airily rescuing French aristocrats imperiled by the Revolution; now he is a peripatetic British archeologist, airily saving scientists from Hitler.

As a Cambridge archeologist, Horatio Smith (Leslie Howard) is welcomed to the Germany of 1939; he has a Nazi commission to dig for traces of an Aryan civilization. In the process of proving that the progress of civilization depends on a few gifted people (mostly scientists, naturally), he excavates 20-odd live German scientists out from under the Gestapo noses.

He gets away with the feat in the best Howard manner: a polished, guileless, casual, sweet performance-restrained, incredible, a screen Englishman.

Mister I was undoubtedly designed for propaganda as well as pleasure, but the gruff Gestapo is too charmingly outfoxed to be taken seriously. The Gestapo head, biding his time, huffs: "Rome wasn't built in a day-even by Mussolini."

Good shot: to frighten some unruly concentration campers laboring in a field, the Nazi guard takes a pot shot at a nearby scarecrow; as he turns away, blood trickles down the scarecrow's hand.

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