The New Pictures

Tortilla Flat (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), a picaresque tale of life among squalid California paisanos, has had an odd history.

John Steinbeck wrote the novel in 1935, and found his first public. Dramatist Jack Kirkland (Tobacco Road) made it into a dirty, dismal, unsuccessful play in 1938, and socked a drama critic* for saying so. It went to Paramount Pictures for peanuts ($4,000) and, after some customary Hollywood sleight-of-hand, wound up at M.G.M. for $60,000.

After Author Steinbeck had acquired success and a bank account,/- he brooded over his wayward Flat, offered $10,000 to remove it from the Hollywood market. This virtually unheard-of maneuver produced its almost inevitable result: Flat became a movie.

Steinbeck's paisanos were shiftless, harmless, simple, brawling, wine-bibbing Mexican mixed-breeds; M.G.M.'s are purebreds Spencer Tracy, Frank Morgan, John Garfield, et al. It is hard for them to be paisanos, but Victor Fleming's eloquent direction produces many a memorable sequence from the formless, wandering story. His characters never become quaint, and their activities are generally human and appealing.

Most of Flat's plot is concerned with keeping Paisano Garfield from committing the unpardonable sin of marrying. This predicament would never have arisen if his grandfather had not died and bequeathed him two clapboard houses and a gold watch--a misfortune bemoaned by his indolent companions when they discover that a peach-skinned Portuguese named Hedy Lamarr has her dark eyes on their new-found wealth.

Paisano Tracy, who can outthink and outtalk his hot-headed young friend, manages to turn the timepiece into four jugs of wine and to reduce Garfield's marriageability by inadvertently burning down one of his inherited houses. But when the irascible, love-struck fellow actually accepts a job to prepare for his marriage, they know he is beyond recall. Their final philosophic gesture, done in sorrow, is to fire his remaining house while he is away honeymooning.

Although Paisanos Tracy, Garfield and others manage their somewhat talky roles with skill, they are snowed under by Comic Frank Morgan, playing straight as the Pirate, a filthy, bewhiskered, bedraggled old codger with five nondescript dogs and an oath to buy a gold candlestick to St. Francis, who once said to him: "Be good to dogs, you dirty man." He keeps his oath by hoarding "1,000 two-bitses," and in the process delivers as adroit and winning a performance as Hollywood has produced all season.

Moontide (20th Century-Fox) has what many a female cinemaddict would like to have: a rough, tough man, with romantic overtones, to take home and tame. He is seamy, sturdy, slow-burning Jean Gabin, onetime foundry worker, marine and music-hall comic, whose talent for acting natural and talking slang made him France's No. 1 male cinemactor.

M. Cabin's charm fitted into such fine French films as Port of Shadows, Grand Illusion, Pepe le Moko, in which he played rugged, earthy, appealing roles. Released from minesweeping service by the fall of France, he at last succumbed to Hollywood, which had vainly offered him everything but control of the industry to come to the U.S. before the war. Moontide, his first Hollywood venture, attempts to keep him in character by casting him as Bobo, a wandering, brawling Pacific Coast dock-walloper, fancy-free and rough on women.

Like many a marine specimen, Bobo supports a parasite (Thomas Mitchell), who gets him dock jobs and shares the proceeds. When the host finds love (Ida Lupino, a short-order waif) and a job on a bait barge, the parasite accuses him of murder and beats up his bride. All ends melodramiably as the cold waters close over the interloper.

This attempted translation of adult French cinema technique is long on art and short on story. Its suspense disappears in its own technically excellent seacoast fogs; its realism drowns in the klieg lights forever playing about on the greying head and Gallic allure of smoldering M. Gabin.

But Moontide has its moments: some Grade-A dialogue by Scripter John O'Hara, a tidy performance by lowering Ida Lupino, and considerable proof that M. Gabin knows his business in at least two languages. Whether American womankind, like their French confreres, will want to chain him in the backyard, will be tested as usual, at the box office.

* Recently swollen by the astronomical $300,000 which 20th Century-Fox paid for his current novel-play, The Moon Is Down.

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