The New Pictures

Jungle Book (Korda; United Artists) is a bold attempt by the epic-minded Brothers Korda (Producer Alexander and Director Zoltan) to make Kipling's beloved animal fable of Mowgli, the Hindu boy who was raised by jungle wolves, into a movie. It can't be done. The myth-destroying movie camera produces a laborious, sometimes silly tale, saved from disgrace only by some of the best Techni-colored animal photography extant.

Star of the beast epic is Shere Khan (real name: Roger), a magnificent half-Bengal, half-Sumatran tiger who is out to get Mowgli (Sabu, the young Hindu who starred in Elephant Boy). The ominous supporting cast includes some 2,000 animals, birds and reptiles--notably a slinky black panther (Bagheera) with a sinister propensity for sharpening his lethal claws on tree limbs, an enormous python (Kaa, who had to be controlled with a blow torch), and a very unpleasant cobra.

When the animals are talking their own language and roaming their improvised jungle near Los Angeles, Jungle Book is as absorbing as a behind-the-scenes trip to the zoo. But when they converse in Kipling's English, the result is painful. The python sounds like Lionel Barrymore; the cobra, who is very long winded, like a wheezy crackerbox philosopher; a tough monkey like a Tammany ward heeler.

Sabu, who returns to his native village and his true mother after his wolfish education is ended, learns how to run with the man pack in no time at all. Buldeo (Joseph Calleia), the hunter, sells him a "tooth" (a long-bladed knife), and he polishes off Shere Khan. But the hunter's lust for the treasure of a lost jungle city which Mowgli reveals to him sends the disgusted wolf-boy back to his animal friends-and leaves the door wide open for a sequel, if the box office warrants it.

Unintentionally hilarious scene: Mowgli enters the hunter's home to buy his "tooth" and discovers a host of his jungle pals--stuffed. Pointing to a fine bear (now a rug) with whom he used to fish, he asks in astonishment: "What happened to him?" "My father shot it," replies the hunter's daughter. Says the wolf-boy: "We missed him six moons ago. He was Baloo's cousin."

The Courtship of Andy Hardy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the twelfth--but not the last--of the Hardy pictures. Like an oldtime serial, the series, which has become M.G.M.'s biggest moneymaker, threatens to go on" forever. As a chronicle of the homey, down-to-middling-good-earth doings of a triumphantly ordinary family in a triumphantly ordinary U.S. town, it is a natural for U.S. moviegoers.

Star of the serial is brassbound Mickey Rooney. In Courtship, Mickey is a big boy now, working, paying for his board, enjoying his father's (Lewis Stone's) adult confidence. Somewhat subdued, Mickey acts his age, cuts his mugging and scene swiping to a pardonable minimum.

His good deed is to rehabilitate a pretty stay-at-home (Donna Reed) who is letting her divorced parents ruin her life. He teaches her how to attract boys, gets her a boy friend, and departs, wondering why he didn't fall in love with her himself. The fact that he didn't will be recognized by all Hardyites as the passage of another milestone in Andrew Hardy's career.

For the last three years, the Hardy pictures have finished in or near M.G.M.'s top ten box-office pictures of the year. The formula that put them there is almost as certain as taxes: the assumption that 85% of the U.S. is God-fearing and oldfashioned, and likes to be reminded of it.

Ardent Hardyites, like fans of the more compelling comic strips, have come to accept the Hardys as real people. They write Actor Stone, in his capacity as Judge Hardy, for legal advice which he is unable to provide; they complain that their sons won't dress for dinner when Mickey doesn't; they bawl out the judge for giving him too much spending money, etc., etc.

This special interest has forced Producer Carey Wilson to keep a Hardy family Bible, in which he records the family's genealogy, ailments, income, etc., in detail. The correspondence that Wilson, Stone and Mrs. Hardy (Fay Holden) have to keep up is enough to give them secretary's cramp. So was the Judge's encounter with a forthright Midwest housewife who spotted him having a spot of whiskey at a Los Angeles hotel. She told him indignantly that such conduct didn't suit a man of his principles.

This Is Blitz (Warwick Pictures; United Artists) is a Canadian documentary film that both Hollywood and the U.S. Government would do well to scrutinize: it is an exciting, instructive account of blitz warfare, its cause and cure.

Blitz is a propaganda film dedicated to the principle that the way to kill the fear of blitz is to show people just what a blitz is. The movie is really an illustrated editorial, in which patient, intelligent narration is skillfully illustrated by camera shots. The sequences themselves are a neat compilation of captured German war films, Allied newsreels, and shots made by the Canadian Government film unit.

The organized, calculated devastation of blitz warfare is told to perfection by the Nazi military cameramen: the patient preparation of the campaign, backed by nine years of organized espionage; the propaganda barrage as zero hour approaches; the bombers annihilating bridges, factories, railroads, fuel dumps, the parachutists seizing airports; the Panzer pincers, followed by motorized infantry, surrounding the enemy; the artillery pounding him to dust; the systematic annihilation of everything inside the ring.

Some of these shots are familiar; most of them are not. Others, such as the look on the faces of Poles being selected for execution by fifth columnists of their own race, are indescribable. Having carefully explained the blitz, the narrator announces that the only defense against this attack is overwhelming counterattack. The picture then illuminates the Allied marshaling of forces for that attack.

Blitz is the work of voluble Scotsman John Grierson, now Film Commissioner of Canada, the pioneer of British documentary makers, and of one of his apter pupils, young (30), Cambridge-grooved Stuart Legg. With Grierson producing, Legg directing, editing and writing the commentary, the pair have turned out 24 documentaries, each one designed to make a major aspect of the war clear to Canadians. Now that United Artists is distributing the series in the U.S., it may perform the same service for Americans, who badly need it.

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