The New Pictures

Underground Report (MARCH OF TIME) etches the history of Fortress Europe, from the days when the Nazis thought they could make the conquered French love them for their brass bands alone to the tense days before invasion. Most of the film was made by the Nazis and captured from them. It generates a terrible excitement.

Underground Report simply illustrates the first Nazi attempts at ingratiation, which soon turn to brutality, and the sullen grief of the conquered French, which soon turns to cold ferocity. In shot after shot of the film, this drama is shown more vividly than the U.S. has ever seen it before. There must be at least 50 moments in the picture's 20 minutes which have tragic, symbolic, or historic grandeur.

Some of them:

P:A porcine athlete flexes his Aryan muscles to impress the vanquished, while a bony female collaborationist applauds hungrily.

P:Before cold-eyed "volunteer" French workers a group of unhappy-looking German entertainers tinkle tunes on glasses to bolster morale.

P:Backed by a grieving hedge of civilians, two Russian Orthodox priests pace the brink of a huge common grave, sprinkling holy water.

P:In two striking shots Joseph Goebbels (see cut), his worried face contrasting with his impeccable overcoat, sees what the Allied bombers have done, and thinned-down Hermann Goring (see cut), looking like a deflated blimp, lolls at "a conference with a worried Adolf Hitler.

P:A definitive image of civilization; in a nobly ornate Italian square a heroic bronze horse, about to be removed to Germany, totters on its scaffolding.

The Hour before the Dawn (Paramount) is a picturization of W. Somerset Maugham's novel of that name. Its thesis: there's nothing wrong with a pacifist that committing murder won't cure. As a boy, Franchot Tone suffered a psychic shock when he shot his dog; after that he was a sourpuss at hunt breakfasts. "Now, if it was the birds that had the rifles," he would mutter.

When war comes, Conscientious Objector Tone is assigned to pitch hay. The rest of the cast disappears from the picture almost entirely, coming back occasionally for family meals. Tone's brother (John Sutton) is an R.A.F. officer who commutes from the family dinner table to an airdrome hidden in a nearby pasture.

Tone's exactress sister-in-law (Binnie Barnes) plays the camp circuit, drops in for lunch. Tone's father (Henry Stephenson) hasn't time to finish dessert before he's due for Home Guard drill.

But busiest of all is Franchot's girl (Veronica Lake), a refugee with a hot-potato Austrian accent. She is a good pastry cook and Nazi. Between cakes, Veronica sneaks off to plot the destruction of the airdrome and Tone's brother. At long last, Veronica is seen igniting a hay rick to guide the Luftwaffe. Promptly Tone strangles her, joins the R.A.F. When last seen he is high in the air, grinning like a Hollywood Japanese.

Mr. SkefTington (Warners) is a self-made, patient Jew named Job (Claude Rains), who falls in love with Fanny Trellis (Bette Davis), a vain, bright dab of icing from Manhattan's upper crust. To help her brother out of a scrape, Fanny marries Job. Then they both sit down to pay. During the '30s Mrs. Skeffington, a clattering divorcee, goes in for younger & younger men while her husband and daughter go to face the perils of Nazi Germany. Mrs. Skeffington contracts diphtheria, loses her looks, and stages a frantic sort of dance of death with her old beaux. Mr. Skeffington, broken and blinded, gets back to prove to his wife that beauty is not all and that all is not vanity.

This story of a self-centered woman (from the novel by "Elizabeth") provides a two-and-a-half-hour field day for Cinemactress Bette Davis. As a ruthless Gramercy Park beauty, vintage 1914, she has studied such archaic cinebelles as Anita Stewart to startling advantage. As a cloche-hatted bar-prowler of the '20s, she is even more sharply evocative. But as the divorcee, she runs to caricature. Her make-up as an ex-beauty is a stentorian overstatement.

Some of Director Vincent Sherman's evocations are excellent. But Mr. Skeffington as a whole is neither so realistic nor so intelligent as many of its details.

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