The New Pictures

The Glass Key (Paramount) is the best melodrama since The Maltese Falcon (TIME, Oct. 20, 1941), also based on a Dashiell Hammett shocker. It also clears up any lingering doubts about the status of 29-year-old Alan Ladd. He is the livest thing to turn up in this sort of scarehead since James Cagney in The Public Enemy.

In The Glass Key, Ladd plays cold, frail, brainy dandy Ed Beaumont, who uses his wits and risks his life to help a friend out of a tight place. The friend is naive Politician Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy). The plot revolves about the doings of 1) Veronica Lake-with-her-hair-up, who is playing Madvig for a sucker but has a glad eye for Friend Beaumont; 2) her father, a corrupt politician, Madvig's candidate for governor; 3) her playboy brother, who gets murdered; 4) a gelid gambling boss (Joseph Calleia) who tries to pin the murder on Madvig.

For those who can take it, The Glass Key is a hard, fast, frightening hour, with a few soft spots. Veronica Lake's special talents give inappropriate energy to a somewhat vapid role. Alan Ladd is really the whole picture. With expert writing, direction and a very solid cast working to dilute him, Ladd makes Beaumont come close to the character that Hammett had in mind--an admirable, minor-league Machiavelli.

The Fighting French (MARCH OF TIME, 20fh Century-Fox) begins as a squadron of British planes roar in so low and so fast over Occupied France that the land beneath them flows and tilts like a stormy sea. This mood of hazardous intimacy is the fierce dramatic pacesetter for a picture of a totally defeated nation coming to rebirth by the simple act of refusing to concede itself licked.

The film lasts 20 minutes. Its scope is global. The camera swings from Paris to London to the U.S., from New Caledonia to Equatorial Africa. The commentary is terse. The screen itself, in its simple documenting of events and people, clinches one irrefutable fact: No U.S. citizen need question again the will of Frenchmen to be free.

The camera makes this will-to-freedom explicit in the faces of Fighting French soldiers marching up to battle stations or manning anti-aircraft guns on a destroyer; makes it visually implicit in the contrast between the faces of Nazified Frenchmen and those who would be free. There is a vivid shot of faces at an Underground meeting contrasted with those around the Nazi collaborationist Jacques Doriot; another of the "political vultures" around Laval, contrasted with the resolute faces of Fighting Frenchmen as they enlist under De Gaulle in London. There is one memorable glimpse of the cold, incredulous fury in the eyes of the victims of Laval's industrial draft. In such shots The Fighting French has the fierce impact of a Daumier drawing. More important, the picture conveys a cumulative sense of a nation possessing not only the spirit but the gathering power to make a comeback.

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