The New Pictures

Stand By for Action (M.G.M.), the story of a U.S. destroyer, is a Hollywood counterpart of Noel Coward's In Which We Serve (TIME, Dec. 28). As such it brilliantly exhibits Hollywood's limitations. Its action is fully as exciting, its battle scenes even more spectacular than those in In Which We Serve. The only thing it lacks is real people.

Stand By tells the adventures of a patched-up 26-year-old four-stacker in the Pacific. The story is given a piquant twist by the fact that the destroyer goes into its big battle with a maternity ward below decks--survivors of a torpedoed ship. While infants wail and the ship's carpenter does his best to midwife a new baby, the destroyer drives in on a Jap battleship and, with a display of fireworks which alone is worth the price of admission, sinks her.

Despite its infantile plot and characters who bear no convincing resemblance to men of the U.S. or any other navy, Stand By is fast, better-than-average-entertainment. With technical advice from the Navy, Hollywood has at least learned how to stage a realistic-looking sea battle.

Of the three stars (Charles Laughton, Brian Donlevy, Robert Taylor) who attempt to impersonate naval officers in the picture, Mr. Laughton, as an irascible old rear admiral, is the loudest and funniest. His climactic line comes when he is handed a signaled message from the destroyer just after the battle. He pauses before reading it to declaim to his fellow officers on the bridge of his flagship: "This message . . . will probably be as famous in the American Navy as Perry's 'We have met the enemy and they are ours.' . . ." The message: IT'S A BOY!

The Cat People (RKO-Radio) is a brain-cracking story of a girl who turns cat. It is not quite so horrifying as its makers wanted it to be because Simone Simon does not give people real feline shudders.

Cats enthrall Heroine Irene Dubrovna (Simone Simon). When she is awake, her subcutaneous felinity makes real cats arch & spit; when she is asleep, cats pad across her brain. She believes legends to the effect that her medieval Serbian ancestors were half-cats, and that she cannot let husband Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) kiss her lest she sprout claws and rip him apart. Psychiatrist Dr. Judd (Tom Conway) delivers sermons on over-imagination. The tactless husband discusses Simone with Alice-at-the-office (Jane Randolph), gradually succumbs to her sympathy. After Alice is ambushed three times by Simone a la cat, husband decides to put Simone in an asylum. In the showdown, the pragmatic psychiatrist kisses Simone, gets the shock of his life.

Reunion in France (M.G.M.) is a Joan Crawford version of the fall of France. As history is made, Miss Crawford looks big-eyed, weeps, sighs, registers disillusionment, at length throws her 'elegantly gowned self into the French underground movement--all with unclear effect. Whatever it is, it is not France.

Philip Dorn, who has his first starring role in this picture, shows that he deserves a better one. As a French industrialist who stays in Paris to collaborate with the Nazis, he has moments in which he almost makes the picture seem important. But the film, which starts as if it were going to be a portrait of a traitor, soon becomes just another melodrama.

The Palm Beach Story (Paramount), a wacky, sexy comedy written and directed by imaginative Preston Sturges, gives Rudy Vallee his first chance to do something besides croon, and he does it in a surprisingly winning way. As a pince-nezed, third-generation Rockefeller (screen name: John D. Hackensacker III) who pursues slinky Claudette Colbert like an expectant collector after a particularly fine butterfly, Rudy is a sketch.

Other ingredients in Mr. Sturges' glittering cocktail are Joel McCrea (as Claudette's husband), and a gay new Mary Astor (as Rudy's sister) with her hair dyed blonde for the first time to distinguish her from brunette Claudette. The plot sometimes seems in need of sign posts to keep things straight. It has to do with Miss Colbert's flight from her husband to Florida and high jinks--which end with Miss Colbert being disrobed by her husband while Rudy croons to her from the garden.

The picture is ably summed up by Mr. McCrea, who observes to Miss Astor: "You never think of anything but Topic A, do you?"

Miss Astor: "Is there anything else?"

CURRENT & CHOICE

In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, Bernard Miles, John Mills, Celia Johnson; TIME, Dec. 28).

Random Harvest (Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Susan Peters; TIME, Dec. 28).

Gentleman Jim (Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, Alan Hale, Jack Carson; TIME, Dec. 14).

George Washington Slept Here (Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, Percy Kilbride; TIME, Nov. 30).

Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Claude Rains: TIME, Nov. 30).

For Me and My Gal (Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy, TIME, Nov. 16).

You Were Never Lovelier (Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire, Adolphe Menjou; TIME, Nov. 16).

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