The New Pictures

Du Barry Was a Lady (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the Hollywood version of Songwriter Cole Porter's tuneful Broadway dream about the Court of Louis XV. The Broadway dream was lively enough to wake anybody up. The Hollywood dream is all too easy to sleep through. Broadway offered the team of Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman and Betty Grable, with a good grade of gents'-room humor. Hollywood substitutes Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and Virginia O'Brien, with vulgarity from the lesser lavatories.

There is much fine Technicolor and court pouf-pouf. But pretty Lucille Ball needs a voice; Cabaret Comedian Zero Mostel in his screen debut seems to need an intimate audience; Tommy Dorsey's band needs fewer powdered wigs and more good tunes to play. A characteristic flight of wit is a non-Porter song which runs: "No matter how you slice it, it's still Salome."

Prelude to War (U.S. Army) was not made for civilians, but to teach U.S. fighting men why they are at war. Its makers neither intended nor imagined that civilian audiences would see it. But since OWI's Elmer Davis (and, reputedly, President Roosevelt) found it good, its general distribution was all but inevitable.

The film is both education and propaganda. In one hammering hour, it not only sketches recent world history from the Mukden Incident to the conquest of Ethiopia; it also makes the first impressive attempt in a U.S. film to present the theory and practice of Fascism. The picture works under several handicaps: 1) the broad contents of its story are wearily familiar to many; 2) the territory which must be covered is vast and intricate; 3) the teaching method--that of the illustrated lecture--means that the enormous power possible in screen images is dominated and reduced by words. But against these obstacles, Prelude to War does nearly always a better-than-average job, occasionally a brilliant one.

The shots--90% from newsreels and confiscated enemy films--rise to levels of tragic poetry (a drum-deafened sequence of hordes of marching Axis children, youths, men in uniform, and the dazed faces of their elders) and pity and terror (a shrill, doomed maggot-swarm of naked, newborn, state-ticketed Axis babies). There is some effort--there might well have been more--to demonstrate the United Nations' shameful failure to realize the intimate connection between their fate and that of a ravaged Manchurian hut in 1931. There is also a 1939 newsreel, a poll of man-in-the-street views on U.S. intervention: the confused statements and blank, well-meaning faces have a shock value that is startling.

Among the film's serious faults are the commentators' voices--too often as soapy and unctuous as the average in such assignments. There is a good deal of unfortunate, hackneyed talk about someone called John Q. Public. And in a closing shot of the two halves of the world, the Eastern Hemisphere (described as "slave") is shown being totally eclipsed by the Western Hemisphere ("free"). This appalling boner is strongly counteracted by the film as a whole, but could be seriously misleading.

Sicilian-born Lieut. Colonel Frank Capra, who commands the Army unit which made Prelude to War, was one of the finest directors in Hollywood when he was putting Harry Langdon through such comedies as The Strong Man. With It Happened One Night and subsequent box-office wows, he became one of the slickest and most surefire, and developed a warm but somewhat spongy liberalism. The war and the Army seem to have stiffened his humanitarian fiber. Never a bossy boss, he leaves his assistants much to their own devices. He can well afford to--among the film virtuosi now under his command are Major Anatole Litvak, Major Anthony Veiller, and veteran cutter Captain William Hornbeck. Among their projects is a series of three films called Know Your Enemy, seven called Know Your Allies.

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