The New Pictures

Saboteur (Frank Lloyd; Universal) is one hour and 45 minutes of almost simon-pure melodrama from the hand of the master: bejowled, Buddha-ball Director Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, etc.), whose guileless countenance and cherubic demeanor mask a talent for scaring hell out of cinema audiences.

Saboteur's ingredients are not uncommon, but Master Hitchcock deals them out in a sinister manner that makes them appear so. The story is concerned with the efforts of a Pacific Coast aircraft-factory mechanic (Robert Cummings) to track down the man (Norman Lloyd) who set fire to the plant. That is not easy, for Cummings himself is mistakenly wanted by the police as the saboteur.

A melodramatic journey from coast to coast shows Hitchcock at his best. It gives movement, distance and a terrifying casualness to his painful suspense. It leads the hero to the palatial Nevada ranch of the master saboteur (Otto Kruger), into the hands of the police, out of them to an abandoned desert mining town loaded with paraphernalia to blow up Boulder Dam, on to Manhattan and an ironic denouement. The Girl (Priscilla Lane), of course, is picked up en route.

Hitchcock, who admits to a liking for murder amid babbling brooks, steps up the excitement of his picture by deftly under stating his saboteurs' characters. One (Alan Baxter), a nice chap who might be an accountant, amiably discusses his children and their future with Cummings, who has passed himself off as a ring member.

Another, guarding blonde Miss Lane in a sky-high Rockefeller Center office, earnestly observes: "I hope we can get rid of her soon. I promised to take my kid sister to the Philharmonic."

These artful touches serve another purpose which is only incidental to Saboteur's melodramatic intent. They warn Americans, as Hollywood has so far failed to do, that fifth columnists can be outwardly clean and patriotic citizens, just like themselves. Saboteur Kruger is rich, respected, likable, candidly admits that he is for the Axis because he wants a more profitable type of U.S. government.

Nicely pointed sequence: Case-hardened Saboteur Lloyd, taxi-bound for evil doings at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, observes the foundered Normandie at her Hudson River pier, indulges in a slow, sly, satisfied smile as the wounded liner passes from view.

In This Our Life (Warner) is billed as a cineversion of Ellen Glasgow's novel about an ineffectual Southern aristocrat who has lost his money but not his manners. Picture and book have only one thing in common: the title. The film's story is much more like The Little Foxes.

The hardworking, competent cast is too high-powered for the picture. Long-suffering Bette Davis, in bangs and a short bob, is the attractive, spoiled, egomaniacal daughter of a man (Frank Craven) whose uncle-in-law (Charles Coburn) stole his business. Sister Olivia de Havilland is pretty sure she won't get a chance at happiness until big sister is disposed of.

Bette bounds off with Olivia's husband (Dennis Morgan), leaving a fiance (George Brent) in her wake, bounds right back after her catch has killed himself. When it becomes apparent that nothing much is ever going to come of all this sound and fury over a tyrannical child, Our Life curls up its toes and subsides. Miss Davis, fleeing from a manslaughter rap for running over a child, wrecks her car and dies.

Nasty bit of business: devious Bette, home from driving her purloined husband to suicide, and burning to get out of town, tries to wheedle the cash to do it with from her robber-baron uncle, wins a chuckle from him with the brazen admission: "Guess I'm kill or cure." When he refuses to give her the money, she tries to make the old man drink himself to death.

Guerrilla Brigade (Artkino) is a significant footnote to history. It went before the cameras in July 1939--one month before the Nazi-Soviet mutual non-aggression pact was signed. Several months later it was released. Since all Soviet films must have Government approval to be shown, the picture is proof that the Russians, despite the pact, knew that the Germans were their enemies and were preparing to fight them.

Guerrilla's story is an action tale of how one guerrilla movement grew big enough to drive the Kaiser's spike-helmeted legions out of the heart of the Ukraine in World War I. Its photography is undistinguished, its climaxes sometimes reminiscent of a Hollywood Western, but it has drive and spirit, occasional good humor, and a fine feeling of what the Russian people fight for, and how.

When Director Igor Savchenko set out to make his picture, he took his company to a small central Ukrainian hamlet named Svirki. Some of the townsfolk had been guerrillas in World War I; none had forgotten the Germans. None would play German soldiers; those extras had to be imported from Kiev.

Many an old peasant improved Savchenko's script by offering him a real sequence from the last war. One, after watching for some time, politely informed the director that the sequence was not quite correct. He said tomatoes now grew where his barn had been, that the Germans had taken his cow and knocked out his wife with a rifle butt. In other particulars, however, the scene was faithful. Then he added: "We killed the German near the tree over there." There is no more make-believe in Svirki. The Germans took it again last year. Now everyone has a guerrilla role.

Before Hitler's smash at Russia, fewer than twelve U.S. cinemansions were showing Soviet films. As Russian resistance to Hitler's onslaught rose, so did Americans' curiosity. At present nearly 200 theaters are playing Soviet pictures, 2,000 carry their short subjects. Variety, the bible of U.S. show business, recently made this turnabout official, crowed in its Blitzkrieg jargon: Vodka Films' OK Biz.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.