The New Pictures

The Adventures of Tartu (M.G.M.-Gainsborough) enlists Robert Donat, Valerie Hobson and a cast like a jeweler's tray in the shiniest spy thriller since Night Train (TIME, Jan. 13, 1941). Many expert British melodramas baffle U.S. audiences because they are too exotically British. This one, directed in Britain by M.G.M.'s Harold S. Bucquet, is as intelligible to Americans as to Englishmen.

Robert Donat plays a British chemist who undertakes a secret, suicidally difficult mission to Rumania. His orders: to get a job in a Nazi plant which is manufacturing the most destructive poison gas in history. He must also learn the formula and destroy the plant in time to avert the use of the gas against Britain.

Agent Donat arrives by parachute, spends a few minutes disguised as a Rumanian peasant, then transforms himself into Tartu, a Rumanian Iron Guardist, reeking with pomade, corny gallantries and devotion to the New Order.

In a remarkably short time Tartu: 1) locates key friends and key foes, 2) gets the job at the gas works, 3) does a broken-field run through the intricate perils which arise from the fact that he is suspected by friend & foe alike, 4) completes his explosive assignment in the hotfooted course of one of those thrilling, dreamlike chases in which pursuers stick out their chins for the hero, great iron doors delay their closing just long enough for him to skin through, and a car and plane synchronize a getaway as happy, and unlikely, as a chain letter that really pays off.

In these exciting shenanigans Donat is supported by Valerie Hobson as the politically ambiguous darling of several Nazi big shots, by an incisively cast crowd of Nazis, saboteurs and undergrounders, and by pacing as shrewdly varied as that of a roller coaster. Miss Hobson, besides being a sensible actress, is one cinemactress who can really be described as beautiful. As the gigolesque Iron Guardist, rococo Robert Donat turns in one of the best performances of his career. All Tartu needs, to be a classic of its kind, is the sort of razor-edged melodramatic and psychological inventiveness which belongs to Alfred Hitchcock in strict monopoly and has been conferred on a very few of his compatriots, in very small doses.

A Lady Takes A Chance (RKO-Radio) takes quite a few. It takes a chance with one more treatment of a well-worn story-pattern (the Cowboy & the Lady), and emerges from the scrimmage with a broad grin to offset its black eye. It takes a chance with making the cowboy (John Wayne) rather more than a nice boy, the lady (Jean Arthur) rather less than a lady, and both of them rather more primordially interested in each other than the Hays Office likes to feel that people should be. Director William Seiter seems to have fallen just short of a new sort of realistic, deeply indigenous comedy. His picture is often crude, sometimes raw, but definitely worth seeing.

Miss Jean Arthur is a personable young New Yorker on a gruesomely predigested bus tour of the prewar West. The tour begins to interest her when, at a rodeo, bronco-busting John Wayne falls on, and all but busts, her. The pair recuperate in a deafening Western barroom, involve themselves in a saloon free-for-all, settle down to their essential business on a hay wagon and, after Miss Arthur misses her bus, in a sinister small-town hotel.

Here the difference between East & West first becomes seriously apparent to Jean Arthur. Whitmanesque Mr. Wayne, who loves nothing half so much as his freedom and his horse, is of the delicate opinion that "women are like socks; ya gotta change 'em often." Miss Arthur, who has marriage in her eye, is sure that "any fella that can love a horse can love a girl." Charles Winninger, Wayne's elderly sidekick, tries to warn her that she is "barking up the wrong cowboy." It turns out that he is wrong.

The rather frank realism which goes on just behind the eyes and the lines of this eager young couple is abetted by some excellent rawboned Western street scenes and by some unusually vivid uses of sound (coyotes, snores, a neighing horse) and camera (scrambled focus for excitement and intoxication) to startle and amuse. John Wayne manages, more toughly if less charmingly than Gary Cooper in his early days, to create a sort of Rocky Mountain Jean Gabin. Jean Arthur, who has the brunt of the comedy to handle, is one of the most attractive handlers in the business, but undermines some of her funniest work by a growing tendency to put the horseplay before the part.

Mr. Lucky (RKO-Radio) is a gambler (Mr. Cary Grant) who dodges the draft and helps out with war relief in the shameless course of melting down an ice-cube heiress (Laraine Day) into giving him a gambling concession at a relief ball. Lucky's war-relief plan is simple: to cheat Manhattan's social heavy cream out of its white ties and rhinestones. But as time wears on, Gambler Grant, who is of Greek extraction, develops a tender conscience as a result of the courage of his compatriots and his love for eager Heiress Day. So he heroically double-crosses his pals, recovers from a consequent slug in the midriff and renders himself worthy of Cinemactress Day by joining the Merchant Marine.

As comedy, Mr. Lucky is the successful sum of timeless Hollywood formulas and two new ones. The old twists:

> A husky man inan apron (Mr. Grant) is always good for a laugh. When he is surrounded by knitting matrons who gravely inform him that purl is spelt pee-yew, the appeal is irresistible.

> Equally irresistible is the mugg in high society ("Bang-bang, fella," says Mr. Grant to the shocked butler who discovers his revolver) and the untamed male who submits to the implacable housekeeping of a respectable woman.

The new twists:

> A new brand of double talk (sample: "Lady from Bristol" for "pistol") which if it catches on, should make the high-school element more unintelligible than ever.

> The discovery that it is possible to say right out what nearly every man secretly feels about the discomforts of the draft--provided the sentiments are put in the mouths of obvious blackguards (Mr. Lucky and pals). Some of the comments on the draft in this picture are so frank that a loud giggle from cinemaudiences greets the appearance of a frowning Uncle Sam on a recruiting poster.

The Sky's the Limit (RKO-Radio) whips Fred Astaire, Joan Leslie and Robert Benchley together with some other promising ingredients, then collapses into equal parts of mild pleasure and disappointment. Most cinemusicals are so large, loud and splendid that seeing one is like trying to eat a wedding cake singlehanded. The Sky's the Limit is rather short (89 minutes), rather unspectacular (there are no chorus numbers), rather quiet (three suave tunes).

In most cinemusicals the romantic protagonists cut each other's throats more shamelessly than they would dare to do in the most Borgian drama about man's inhumanity to man. In The Sky's the Limit a modest Flying Tiger (Fred Astaire) on hurried leave, a torpid picture-magazine publisher (Robert Benchley) and a photogenic photographer (Joan Leslie) work out their triangular difficulties with such decent respect for each other that they might be mistaken, in cloudy weather, for very nice human beings. The Sky's the Limit should have been a shattering innovation. Instead, it will do nicely enough until Fred Astaire makes another picture.

One of the best dancers since Nijinsky, Fred Astaire should have had more dances to do. In The Sky's the Limit he has only three, none of which suggests the fact, nimbly demonstrated in shows like Top Hat, that Astaire's dancing at its best can be a pure, heart-lifting delight. His latest partner, Joan Leslie, imparts the double impression in their dance numbers that she is hanging onto his thumb and that she is doing remarkably well in view of the fact that she is not Fred Astaire. At less strenuous moments Cinemactress Leslie is so nice to look at that her feet are the last thing anybody is likely to notice.

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