The New Pictures

Action in the North Atlantic (Warner Bros.) is a celluloid glorification of the U.S. merchant marine. To accomplish its business, it signs on First Mate Humphrey Bogart under Skipper Raymond Massey and puts these tough, tenderhearted salts safely through a disaster-laden, pulp-fictional log of two wartime Atlantic crossings. In an interval ashore, Bogart punctuates the voyages with one of his own patented semicolons by finding just enough time to saunter into a waterfront dive, sock a loose-talking barfly and marry the blonde, black-gowned entertainer of the place almost before she can finish throating Night and Day. Connection between this incident and the surrounding adventures at sea: none.

Voyage No. 1 is made by a tanker laden with high-test gas. While steaming through foggy weather the ship is torpedoed, and her flaming decks are abandoned just before she goes down. The survivors of a subsequent machine-gunning and ramming are picked up and taken to New York.

Many of them next ship on a freighter in a huge North Atlantic convoy, Murmansk-bound. Attacked in mid-ocean by a fleet of German submarines, the ship leaves the convoy, but is trailed by one of the U-boats, runs under some Nazi bombers, is finally torpedoed by the dogging sub. Acting as captain in place of the wounded Massey, Bogart sets fire to his own decks, pretends to abandon ship, makes the Germans come to the surface, then rams and sinks them. The freighter limps into port with cargo intact.

The picture is a symphony of heaving, buckling studio sets, dubious ship-model photography and explosions on the sound track. Like many current war films, it suggests oldtime flicker serials, is directly in line of descent from The Perils of Pauline. For making it, Warner Bros, is being allowed to fly a special Maritime Service Victory Flag.

Bataan (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) tries to show a few days in the lives of twelve American and Filipino soldiers and one sailor, as the enemy pushes down the peninsula. The task of Sergeant Bill Dane (Robert Taylor) and his men is to cover the retreat, hold a bridgehead as long as possible, destroy the bridge as often as the Japanese attempt to rebuild it. One by one, through several days of sweat, fever, exhaustion, din and death, the entrenched men fall to Jap action. The last of his group alive, Sergeant Dane stands in a grave which he has marked with his own name and machine-guns hordes of advancing Japs.

Bataan's scenery is "realistic" down to the last carload of tropical foliage--and its drama is constantly loud and overemphatic. But there are a few stretches when the military situation calls for silence, the noisy sound track quiets down and, for a moment, incredibly enough, Hollywood's war takes on the tense, classic values of understatement.

Show Business At War (THE MARCH OF TIME) is a seven-league-boot coverage of the theatrical profession's wide and generous war activity, from Times Square to Hollywood. The film covers a little too much: the production of the various Army & Navy film units may or may not be worth seeing, but fleeting glimpses of the units themselves are dull.

The cameras, however, have fetchingly caught many headliners regaling the servicemen: Irving Berlin, Joe E. Brown, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr, Alfred Lunt. Notable other records of celebrities: the late Carole Lombard on her last War Bond selling tour; Carole Landis answering a soldier's request for the radioed sound of one of her heartrending sighs; Eugene Ormandy waving the Philadelphia Orchestra through a Strauss waltz; 57-year-old Al Jolson singing his 22-year-old Mammy. There are also some excellent shots of the audiences--the entertained are as entertaining as the entertainer.

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