The New Pictures

Broadway Rhythm (M.G.M.) is a Technicolored, tune-stirred summer salad into which M.G.M.'s chefs seem to have whipped practically everyone and every thing on the lot except Leo the Growl and Louis B. Mayer. Most conspicuous ingredients are Ginny Simms, George Murphy, Charles Winninger, Gloria De Haven, Lena Home, Hazel Scott, Rochester, Tommy Dorsey. The show lasts just a quarter short of two hours, so there is plenty of time to doze between the best moments. There are also a great many tunes, of which the best remains the 1939 All the Things You Are, as Ginny Simms sings it. Admirers of Lena Home will get a lithe eyeful during a dance which combines conga and boogie-woogie mannerisms. One comic line that approaches universality, as George Murphy sorely delivers it: "I may not always be right but I'm never wrong."

The Hitler Gang (Paramount) is a triumph of cinemakeup. With uncanny realism it recreates the physical appear ance of the Nazi bigwigs in a fascinating collection of talking waxworks. Paramount hunted high & low for Nazi doubles. The Hitler was easy. Cinemactor Robert Watson has already scared little children in that role in four pictures (The Devil with Hitler, Hitler, Dead or Alive, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Nazi Nuisance). He practiced his earnest performance so strenuously that he wore his larynx to a frazzle. One night the neigh bors, hearing his hysterical yawpings against Jews, came over to beat him up.

Even more accurate, in an easier role, is Victor Varconi. He thickened his eye brows, blended the mannerisms of a body guard and a devoted wife, became a dead ringer for Rudolf Hess. Luis Van Rooten's Heinrich Himmler is verisimilitudinous enough to make flesh crawl. Even when resemblances are not quite accurate, casting and the general performance are psychologically effective. Goring's jocund tigerishness is embodied by a bulky Hungarian named Alexander Pope. Martin Kosleck does not look much like Joseph Goebbels but manages to capture Goebbels' sidelong glide, his peculiar blend of cynicism and venom. As the niece whom Hitler is supposed to have seduced and murdered, Poldy Dur is a suitably nubile stimulant to any psychopath.

The picture's theme is the rise of Na tional Socialism from the gutter to the June 1934 Blood Purge. The film is a sober attempt to screen history. It is forceful as propaganda, sharp as cartooning, interesting as journalism, sometimes exciting as cinema. But it is inadequate to its subject. In part this failure is due to the attempt to pack 16 of the most crowded, crucial, sinister years of modern German history into 101 minutes of lively cinema. In part it is due to the fact that Nazi characters and motives are simplified to the point of absurdity. Responsibility for the rise of Naziism is attributed to the ambitions of a little group of Nazi fanatics.

The interpretations of Nazi history and Nazi personalities are shallow and sometimes dangerously misleading. It will probably be a long time before anyone achieves a realistic understanding of Adolf Hitler. Years ago he was regarded as just funny. Later he was regarded as a malign genius against whom "decent people" could only do their bewildered best. This film regards him as a dangerous, absurd little maniac with an incredible gift of gab and no brains. In a historical sense that is a dangerous, absurd little idea.

The Adventures of Mark Twain (Warners). When this picture tells Mark Twain's story as Mark Twain might, it is a happy, sunlit, rowdy re-creation of a great native character and great native scene. When it becomes too dogged about the facts of Twain's life, it runs into snags.

The first half of the film is the best. The boys who play Mark Twain (Jackie Brown) and friends make the Tom Sawyer days just another Our Gang comedy. But Fredric March, by a meticulous make-up job (see p. 55) is fine as the young Mark Twain. When River Pilot Twain steers his steamboat through blind fogs and over impossible shoals, something of the glory and the glamor which Twain captured in Life on the Mississippi comes to life on the screen. And there are other authentic touches, like the episode in which Mark and dandified John Carradine (as Bret Harte) pit their bullfrogs in a hilarious jumping match that is several jumps funnier than Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Once Twain comes east, he runs into trouble, and so does the film. It still has warm, moving, or funny moments (Twain's courtship, his demonstration of a preposterous, pre-Mergenthaler linotype machine, his championship of weary, broken, old ex-President Grant). But the simple, grand, sardonic character loses stature and clarity in a clutter of biographical episodes. The film fails to get the most out of the famed banquet at which, with Whittier, Longfellow and Emerson glaring at him across the table, Twain punctured their pomposity--in part because he was impressed by it--by casting them as soused old demireps in a frontier yarn. Twain's wife (Alexis Smith) is represented not as a mixed blessing, but as a lovely, encouraging helpmeet. The terrible "dark period" of Twain's latter years, when he lived in a melancholy as bottomless as that which all but destroyed Lincoln, is touched on only in a memorable line:

"Sometimes I feel like a stalk of corn left standing all alone in the field." But one cinemalteration of Twain's biography succeeds : in Florence, Twain quietly sings his dying wife to sleep with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Going My Way (Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald; TIME, May i).

The Memphis Belle (TIME, April 17).

Cover Girl (Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly; TIME, April 10).

With the Marines at Tarawa (TIME, March 20).

Up in Arms (Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore; TIME, March 13).

The Uninvited (Gail Russell, Donald Crisp; TIME, Feb. 21).

Miracle of Morgan's Creek (William Demarest, Betty Hutton, Eddie Bracken, Diana Lynn; TIME, Feb. 14).

Song of Bernadette (Jennifer Jones, Gladys Cooper, Charles Bickford; TIME, Feb. 7).

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