The New Pictures

Double Indemnity (Paramount) is the season's nattiest, nastiest, most satisfying melodrama. James M. Cain's novelette was carnal and criminal well beyond screen convention. Director Billy Wilder's casting is just as unconventional. Naturals for their parts are Fred MacMurray as an insurance salesman capable of murder; Barbara Stanwyck as the unprintable blonde (for the occasion) who exploits his capabilities; Edward G. Robinson as the insurance-claims sleuth who sniffs out the flaws in their all-but-perfect crime.

Insurance Salesman MacMurray first visits Miss Stanwyck's dreary suburban Los Angeles chalet to sell her husband a policy, not to murder him. But leggy Miss Stanwyck is already dreaming of homicide and a gay widowhood financed by her husband's insurance money. In a trice infatuated Salesman MacMurray lends a hand. He tricks her husband into signing up for an accident policy which guarantees his widow double indemnity. Together they murder him and make the murder look like a fall from a moving train. After the crime comes retribution in the form of Edward G. Robinson.

Scripter Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep) is himself no mean writer of hard-boiled melodrama. With his help Director Wilder and his players manage admirably to translate into hard-boiled cinema James Cain's hard-boiled talents.

They Met in Moscow (Artkino), an unpretentious Russian nonwar film, establishes a Second Front in cinemusicals. It proves with great charm that if a director has a healthy appetite for the beauty of the world as it is, "production numbers" are unnecessary.

The story is simple. A tow-blonde peasant girl (Marina Ladynina) from the forests of far-northern Russia visits the great summer fair at Moscow. There she falls in love with an impassioned young shepherd (Vladimir Zeldin) from the mountains of far-southern Russia. He is proud as a kulak because of his prize sheep. Boy & girl sing at each other enthusiastically, retire to their respective corners of Russia eager for a return bout next summer. In dead of winter, in the foggy mountain rains, the shepherd rescues three lost ladylike ewes from three wolves; his sweetheart delivers her favorite sow of 19 pigs. When not engaged in animal husbandry, the lovers think about each other, with music. Distance and language differences lead to love complications. But everything is straightened out in the end (with the help of a lively score).

Russians, a vigorous people, often carry on the most casual conversation as if they were describing the battle of Stalingrad. They sometimes sing as if they were possessed of seven devils and a Trotskyite. They often sing loudly in They Met in Moscow. But the picture's lyrical ebullience, its naively intense people, its fresh landscapes combine to make something rare in cinema--an unaffected pastoral comedy, spontaneous as a freshet, natural as a pail of warm milk.

People's Avengers (Artkino) is a far cry from They Met in Moscow (see above). It was made by 18 Soviet cameramen who parachuted behind the German lines to record the lives and activities of Russian guerrillas, credited with destroying more than a half-million German soldiers. The film is fragmentary, a merely average Russian documentary (aside from its subject). But it resembles They Met in Moscow in so far as the instinct for poetic realism--the dead center of most good cinema--is almost a national Russian characteristic.

Working on a front which stretched from Leningrad to the Caucasus and which included most climates and all seasons the 18 paracameramen caught most notably:

P: The bullet-twitched fall of a German sentry, a minute before the bridge he is guarding is blown up.

P: A steamy, stealthy sequence among tall reeds, far in the south, with the guerrilla boat and the camera splashed closely by enemy fire.

P: The capture, trial and execution of a traitor: wry, long-necked, the flaps of his cap like the ears of an animal, he looks simpleminded, hardly aware of what is happening to him.

P: A wonderful shot of a German train, moving toward dynamite and demolition: hidden in a soft-blown, shining vista of heavy summer leaves, it sprouts a smoothly advancing, dreamlike tree of smoke.

48 Hours (Ealing-AFE) reduces Graham Greene's fast-paced, improbable story (Went the Day Well?) to a slow-moving, improbable film. Oldtime Director Cavalcanti, heretofore much admired by cinesthetes as a shrewd theorist of sound, is not helped much by William Walton's* undistinguished score, was not wise in splattering Prologist Mervyn Johns's excellent speeches with cheery bird noises.

The story concerns the tiny English hamlet of Bramley End and its two-day seizure by four planeloads of German paratroopers disguised as four lorry-loads of British engineers. Unmasked by Nora Ashton (Valerie Taylor), sweetheart of Community Leader Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks), who is really a fifth columnist, the Germans pen the villagers in the church.

Some of the villagers (including Frank Lawton) escape, hold off the Nazis until the timely arrival of British troops. High spot: Fifth Columnist Banks dying like a dog, in the hammiest death throes since Laocoon's.

*Not to be confused with TIME'S paratrooping Correspondent William Walton.

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