The New Pictures

Journey Into Fear (RKO-Radio) is Orson Welles's first cinema journey into the field of mystery melodrama. Welles shows himself a careful student of Alfred Hitchcock, but he falls far short of the Old Master. Journey Into Fear also falls short of the best Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Amber sons).

The film follows the eerie adventures of a young U.S. engineer (Joseph Gotten) when he is stalked by a group of Nazi trigger men in Turkey. The Nazis want to eliminate Gotten, who is a technical adviser to the Turkish Navy. To get him out of harm's way Turkey's secret service chief (Orson Welles) puts Gotten on a ship. His journey is made hideous by the fact that the Nazis get aboard the same ship.

To create terror and suspense, Welles employs familiar Hitchcock tricks of bizarre lighting and ominous disappearances, and adds some of his own. The picture's unusually pregnant photography always suggests much more than it shows. It makes effective use of a portable phonograph, whose cracked, tinny tune, signaling another killing at each playing, steadily grows in horror. The film is also notable for a terrifying performance by Jack Moss as a tubby Nazi killer.

But the picture never attains the excitement of the Eric Ambler novel on which it is based. Orson Welles overacts; Dolores Del Rio, as a dancer who tries to take the engineer's mind off his fears, has a superfluous part, and Joseph Gotten does not match his excellent performance in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (TIME Jan. 18).

That the picture fails to measure up to its Welles predecessors may be partly due to the fact that it is the first he did not direct himself (director: Norman Foster) and that he left for South America before it was finished. When he saw the completed version, he exclaimed: "RKO must have let the janitor cut the picture," and insisted on writing and shooting a new ending. His revisions, unfortunately, only made the film more confusing.

Lucky Jordan (Paramount) deals with a question that seems to trouble some scenarists: where do U.S. gangsters fit into the war effort?

The story concerns a racket king named Lucky Jordan (Alan Ladd) whose somewhat coarse way of life is interrupted by the Army. Despite his lawyer's efforts to "put in a fix" on his draft board, Jordan is clapped into uniform. By the standard Hollywood formula this should make a new man of him, but Jordan is really tough; he haughtily defies sergeants and Army discipline, finally kidnaps a pretty canteen hostess (Helen Walker) and makes a getaway. Then he discovers that his double-crossing lieutenant, one Slip Moran (Sheldon Leonard), has usurped his racket throne and worked up a new dodge--stealing tank specifications to sell to Nazi spies.

A hijacking chase follows to determine whether Moran or Jordan delivers the plans and collects the seventy-five grand. Somehow Jordan winds up employing his shotgun in the service of Uncle Sam.

As a sociological treatise, Lucky Jordan shows that U.S. gangsters are infinitely nicer than Nazis because 1) they are Americans, 2) they do not like to "go around beating up old women."

The Immortal Sergeant (20th Century-Fox), Hollywood's first picture of the Libyan battlefront, at once makes its audience feel that they have seen it all somewhere before. By the time the first soldier has bit the sand, the film identifies itself: it is none other than Hollywood's old friend, the Foreign Legion of Beau Geste vintage, jerked from the shelf and clothed in a new British uniform.

A timid corporal (Henry Fonda), inspired by his dying sergeant's last words and flashbacks to the girl he left at home (Maureen O'Hara), attacks and wipes out an oasis full of Nazi troops. A nostalgic, phony tale, Sergeant is often exciting, but at its best it looks like the right battle in the wrong war.

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