The New Pictures

Lift Your Heads (British Ministry of Information; OWI). Because a champion German-Jewish boxer picked up a small bird and put it in his wheelbarrow in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, his hands were tied behind his back and he was then strung up by the hands from a tree. The story of his torture, told haltingly by the boxer himself, plus shots of exactly how the Nazis went about it, are memorable moments in this short, sober British documentary. It shows how the British are helping Austrian and German antiFascists get back at Hitler.

Escaping to England before and after Dunkirk, these haunted men, many of whom could not speak a word of English, wanted to join the British Army. A special company was formed for them. The horrors they had experienced did not make them easy to handle. The film tellingly suggests how the British worked to re-establish the refugees' self-confidence--persuading silent men to talk, preventing others from answering "Yes, sir" and "No, sir." But later, when rifles were distributed, fears generally subsided.

This British company cannot surrender, if captured would be immediately shot by the Nazis. One of their songs is entitled Lift Your Heads.

Dixie (Paramount) is a dull, none-too-faithful account of the career of Dan Emmett, author of Dixie, and one of the four Original Virginia Minstrels of 1843. Even the personality of Bing Crosby as Emmett, plus the great historic theme song, plus Technicolor, cannot enliven the picture's turgid progress through three conflagrations, too many minstrel shows leading to fame & fortune in New Orleans. When Crosby sings, fans will not be critical. But much of the time he is engaged in crude, unconvincing romances with Marjorie Reynolds and Dorothy Lamour. And most of the time the minstrelsy is just horseplay.

Stormy Weather (20th Century-Fox) is an all-Negro musical which packs enough talent and enough plain friendliness, if only they were used well, to temper even the contemporary weather of U.S. race relations. Unfortunately, not much comes off as it might have.

The film tells the desultory tale of a dancer (Bill Robinson), from the moment after World War I when he marches up Broadway to the strains of Jim Europe's wonderful band, to the moment after Pearl Harbor when a proud singer (Lena Horne) finally sees it his way and they face the stentorian marriage blessing of Cab Calloway. A great many types of Negro entertainment are represented: some good, some not so good.

Bill Robinson is the Phidias of tap dancing, and there is such humanity in his mere presence that his acting is neither here nor there. Fats Waller & Band, richly aided, tonsils and all, by Singer Ada Brown produce a blues in a Beale Street joint which, if it inevitably falls short of absolute genuineness, is a fine restoration by Grade-A archeologists. The dancing Nicholas Brothers, younger and more agile by some decades than the great Robinson, stage a volcanic family eruption.

Cab Calloway is more a matter of taste--a haberdashing showman who is bound to worry the discriminating by tearing the passions of jazz to tatters. Lena Horne sings with high lavender virtuosity, and audiences will divide on whether she is truly elegant or merely too refined. Katherine Dunham's pretentious ballet troupe is also likely to split the vote.

The best of the show is represented by Robinson and by a not especially brilliant comedian (Dooley Wilson), who will nonetheless delight audiences because he works with just the Elizabethan blend of simplicity and skill which today is seldom found outside Harlem's Apollo Theater.*

Pilot #5 (M.G.M.) is meant to make all America Firsters and quasi quislings feel queasy. It might have been more discomfiting if its perfectly good plot had been told straight, instead of with flashbacks in the middle of a woolly Hollywood version of war in the Pacific. For Pilot deals chiefly with the prewar life of Pilot George Collins (Franchot Tone), who got himself mixed up in machine politics.

Four of his co-pilots reveal, one by one, what each knows of Collins' life. One knew him as a neurasthenic who had been turned down by the Army, another as a high-honor law student in love with sweet and sensible Freddie (Marsha Hunt). Still another, who learned from his brother what Fascismo is like in Italy, reveals that Collins, who had no idea what Fascism was like anywhere, had affiliated himself with a vicious State Governor who believed that "the weak must get out of the way so that the strong can get ahead." Only when Collins saw how the Governor treated the weak did Collins come to his senses--and move toward his doom fighting a Japanese aircraft carrier.

The picture has dramatic tension in parts, and a refreshing lack of Hollywood's more fatuous brand of comic relief. Best sequence: the Fascist-minded Governor staging an act for the newsreels.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Spitfire (Leslie Howard, David Niven; TIME, June 28).

Coney Island (Betty Grable, George Montgomery, Cesar Romero; TIME, June 21).

Stage Door Canteen (Show business people galore; TIME, June 14).

Prelude to War (U.S. Army; TIME, May 31).

Desert Victory (British Army Film & Photographic Unit; TIME, April 12).

* The Apollo, on 125th Street, surrounds white and Negro films with a gargantuan show combining 1) singing, dancing and clowning (with a famed, vigorous amateur night); 2) the best Negro jazz bands, all of whom perform at the top of their mettle before the world's frankest, freshest, more inspiring audience.

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