The New Pictures

The Mask of Dimitrios (Warners). When Cornelius Latimer Ley den (Peter Lorre), a writer of detective thrillers, first saw Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott), Dimitrios lay murdered on a slab in the Istanbul morgue (see cut). Scenting a story, Leyden decided to case Dimitrios' history.

In Smyrna, Leyden learned (in the first of several flash backs), Dimitrios had merely committed a murder. Then he framed a Moslem friend (Monte Blue) into dying for the crime. In Sofia he tried to assassinate a Prime Minister. There he befriended an uxorious little clerk (Steven Geray) in the Maritime Ministry, got him heavily in debt in a gambling house set up by spies for that express purpose, extorted from him the plans of Yugoslavia's mine fields in the Adriatic. Then he left his victim to suicide and, having collected his fee, double-crossed his employers.

More & more interested, little Author Leyden pattered from the Levant, through the Balkans, to Paris, met many interesting people in the course of his researches. In Geneva there was cold, gracious Grodek (Victor Francen), who described himself as "an employer of spy labor." He was writing a biography of St. Francis. In Athens there was bulbous, unctuous Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet). Mr. Peters was also in Belgrade and Paris. And everywhere there were whispers of a cryptic organization called the Eurasian Credit Trust, whose headman turned up for a climax of blackmail and gunfire, with Mr. Peters gasping his life out on a mess of thousand-franc notes. By then Author Leyden had gathered more "material" than he bargained for.

This film version of Eric Ambler's A Coffin For Dimitrios goes in for rich, talky theatricality rather than realism. But on its own level it is lively entertainment, distinguished by some better-than-fair performances (Veterans Lorre and Greenstreet, wolfish Newcomer Zachary Scott and mousily appealing Steven Geray).

Lili Marlene (Crown Film Unit; Universal), like many popular soldier songs, is far from martial. Its words (which are sung by a lonely girl and her lonely sentry sweetheart) were written in Hamburg in 1923. Its trivial, contagious tune/- was made in the Germany of 1938. It was given its drawling lilt in a Berlin cabaret, by a Swedish singer named Lala Andersen (played by comely Pat Hughes), who is now in a concentration camp. (Reason: she wrote in a letter, "All I want is to get out of this horrible country.")

Lili Marlene first became a war song when it was broadcast by a Nazi radio in Belgrade, and was picked up by the homesick soldiers of Rommel's Afrika Korps. It also spoke to the hearts of homesick British soldiers. Lili Marlene became the favorite battle song of Montgomery's Eighth Army.

In a half-hour film, Humphrey Jennings (The Silent Village, Listen to Britain--TIME, Sept. 13) tells the story of the British "capture" of this German song. He forecasts its future in a long gliding panoramic shot of London's postwar dockside market streets, where a honkytonk version creates an obbligato for a children's merry-go-round. There are adroitly timed stock-shots (best: the men of the supremely confident Afrika Korps riding through the ecstatic farewells of civilians). There are bits of irresistible comedy (best: the florid, juicy Italian-tenor version of the song; the whooping refinement of its rendition by Frau Hermann Goering II, re-enacted at Berlin's Kroll Opera House). There is intelligent characterization (best: a subtle young Nazi radioman who introduces Lili Marlene at the height of the German victories, later had to announce major German defeats). But Lili Marlene is the least satisfying of Director Jennings' pictures to reach the U.S. Too many mush-mouthed, romantic studio shots dilute its realism and imaginativeness. The British propaganda version of the song may have been effective in the war of nerves; in this picture it sounds so cheap that it all but defeats its own end. As a film, Lili Marlene never quite makes up its mind whether it is propaganda or cinema.

/-First published in U.S. in Time 3, 1943.

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