The New Pictures

The North Star (Goldwyn-RKO) is a cinemilestone for four reasons:

>It is the first major attempt by a major U.S. producer (Sam Goldwyn) to present Russia's war with the Nazis in the way that Winston Churchill saw it when the war began--not primarily as a struggle for Communism, but as a heroic defense by the Russian people of their homes. Only by implication is North Star revolutionary propaganda.

> It is the first attempt to draw the vast struggle into some graspable unity by typifying all Russia's resistance to the Nazis in the resistance of one Russian village.

>It is the most successful attempt to show a sickening German atrocity (the tapping of Russian children for blood plasma) in credible terms.

> It is the most successful attempt to show the decisive role which Russian guerrillas have played in defeating the Germans.

North Star is the name of a Russian border village on a collective farm. The film's first 35 minutes are devoted to the idyllic life of the collective farmers. Then the Nazis come. The male villagers take to the woods as guerrillas. The women, the younger children, and the village doctor (Walter Huston) stay behind. They are burning down their village when the Nazis arrive. The Nazis put out the fires, break the right arm and leg of a woman comrade (Ann Harding) who will not give them information. They then begin to bleed the Russian children, kill one by taking too much blood. This operation is supervised by a German doctor (Erich von Stroheim) who hates the Nazis, does not like to bleed little children but as an isolated individual obviously cannot do very much about it. A group of older children, who have been on a walking trip, run arms to the guerrillas just in time to assist their attack on the village.

The village doctor tells the German doctor that people who despise the Nazis and serve them are worse than the Nazis, then shoots him. The guerrillas rescue their women and children, cart them away, presumably to the woods.

This simple, violent story (which originated in the mind of Scripter Lillian Hellman) involves political, human and moral issues that could be adequately coped with only in a work of art. North Star tries to be a work of art. It is not. And works of art are seldom made to order. So the real question becomes: Does North Star effectively bring the experience of modern war to U.S. cinemaddicts, most of whom have viewed modern war only from the safe distance of some 3,000 miles? Answer: No other Hollywood film has done the job quite so well.

Jeannie (Tansa--English Films) entered the U.S. meekly by way of a Manhattan art theater, is still packing the place after nine weeks, drew the epithet "delightful" from leather-mouthed Walter Winchell, and has just been nationally released. With nothing more than their bare hands, a little intelligence, tenderness and characterization, the creators of Jeannie tackle a grey-haired comic cliche--The Innocent Abroad--and come up with the best light comedy of the year. Jeannie McLean, a sharp-chinned, homely-pretty Scottish country girl, 26 and single, decides before she buries herself in domestic service, to squander her father's "entire fortune" (a bequest of -L-297--$1,188) on a trip to Vienna. She wants to hear The Blue Danube "played at the source." Aboard the Channel packet she meets a celluloid-collared washing-machine inventor from Yorkshire with plenty of British brass and some neolithic French and German ("Swy tay, bitta").* The flying Yorkshireman deserts her for a floating English blonde, a loose, friendly creature with a voice like a drain. Jeannie consoles herself with a graceful, sponging Count, who mistakes her for the Bank of England, escorts her through her favorite viands (caviar, chicken mousse, Russian salad, peach Melba and champagne at one gulp), postprandially proposes marriage. In the long run, penniless Jeannie and her hard-collared compatriot get together. "Och, it was only the way he kissed my hand," she wistfully explains about the Count.

What gives this ordinary little story its far-from-ordinary charm is its writing, direction, performance, its sympathetic handling of character. Not even the fortune-stalking Graf is a rubber stamp. His weak, deep pathos, as he reverently takes Jeannie's purse in charge, is as real as hers. Michael Redgrave is equally sound as the Englishman. The personnel of Vienna's Hotel Splendide is good enough to have come out of Bemelmans. But the real weight of Jeannie is carried (like a feather) by British Stage Actress Barbara Mullen, the clothes she wears, the lines she handles so delicately, while she turns old-maidishness into a surprised, nascent loveliness. "We never speak about sex in Scotland, Mr. Smith," Jeannie says primly. But Miss Mullen needs no lines. If there were more actresses as good as she is, there would be a fighting chance for more films half as good as Jeannie.

* Tourist-German, for "Two dishes of tea, please."

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