The New Pictures

The Seventh Cross (M.G.M.). When anti-Fascist George Heisler (Spencer Tracy) escapes from Westhofen Concentration Camp, he has faith in nobody and in nothing. Only the most rudimentary instinct for self-preservation keeps him moving, as, sleepless and starved, his hand torn and infected, he creeps from culvert to tool shed to woodpile and at length to Mainz, his native city. One by one his comrades in escape are captured, their dying bodies taken back to hang on six crosses in the courtyard of the camp. The seventh cross waits for Heisler, and waits in vain. And little by little, he learns to have faith and hope in human charity.

A Jewish doctor (Steve Geray) treats his injured hand. A theatrical costumer (Agnes Moorhead) gives him clothes. Not all the people he meets are brave, or intelligent, or kind. His former sweetheart (Karen Verne) has married a Nazi, his brother is a Storm Trooper. But his old friend Paul Roeder (Hume Cronyn), a rabbity little workman who is grateful to the Fuehrer for his job and his three babies, also turns out to have a heart.

There are others: the rich architect (George Macready) whose wife shames him into courage; the hotel barmaid (Signe Hasso) with whom Heisler spends his last night in Germany; the old delicatessen man (Felix Bressart) who finally brings him into contact with the underground. By the time George Heisler leaves Germany he knows he has a lifelong debt to pay, not only to full-time antiFascists like himself, but also to many simple human beings, who had risked helping him out of the goodness of their hearts.

This story, which is not materially changed from Anna Seghers' best-selling novel of the same title (TIME, Sept. 28, 1942), had the makings of one of the finest of anti-Fascist moving pictures. It has become, instead, two hours of handsome, earnest inadequacy, which comes to life only by fits & starts--most memorably in the performances of Hume Cronyn, Agnes Moorhead, Steve Geray. A free use of stream-of-consciousness dialogue and of comment by the ghost of one of the escapers, to point the moral and adorn the tale, succeeds only in diluting both, far more regrettably than the old came-the-dawn subtitles used to.

The escaped prisoners hide out in a velvet-fogged marsh, full of artistically silhouetted reeds, which belongs, if anywhere, in Coronet. Heisler's exhaustion, fear and mistrust are merely stage props, never a living agony of nerves and soul. Tracy himself, careful and sincere and able as he is, is wrong for the role. By strong implication in the novel, George Heisler was a dramatically and morally fascinating species of human being, typical of 20th-century Europe if unfamiliar in the U.S.--a seasoned and astute professional revolutionist. George Heisler as presented in this cautious film is wholly nonpolitical except for his distaste for Naziism; so are his friends in the underground. With the loss of this political energy the film not only loses its truth as a tribute; it also sacrifices, even as melodrama, its vitality.

Casanova Brown (International). More successfully than most stars, Gary Cooper has managed to remain popular with both men & women. For women one of his strongest attractions has been a rugged quasi-helplessness, as of Prometheus bound, or a Great Dane on a tea wagon. International Pictures, in its first production, has shrewdly carried this appeal to its sure-fire ultimate: it has saddled Gary Cooper with the care & feeding of a baby.

In this rattlebang old stage hit by Floyd Dell and Thomas Mitchell (Little Accident, 1928) Mr. Cooper comes by his crushing responsibility somewhat unconventionally. For some time, in fact, as Cooper and his prospective second father-in-law Frank Morgan gamily swap innuendoes, the audience thrills to the possibility that he is the father of one of cinema's rare bastards, and a farcical one at that. For he is called to Chicago on the day he is to marry a home-town girl, to do his duty by Teresa Wright in a lying-in hospital. As it turns out, he had married Miss Wright a proper interval ago, been confronted with a socialite father-in-law and his star-gazing wife (Patricia Collinge), who disapproved of smoking. With the help of a concealed cigaret-butt and some very funny writing by Nunnally Johnson, he had contrived to burn their house down and, not hearing from his estranged bride, a minor, had concluded that the marriage was annulled.

Miss Wright, who wants to find out whether he still loves her, is content to let him think not only that, but also that she is soon to remarry and intends to put her baby on the adoption market. It is that prospect which prods the proud father to action. He kidnaps the child and, hidden in a hotel, dives into a nonstop orgy of gauze masks, baby-gruels, weighings-in, and attendant embarrassments.

Mr. Cooper, luckily, is well qualified to keep such comic material within range of masculine bearability. Miss Wright, unluckily, has little on which to employ her charm and talent. Frank Morgan and Patricia Collinge, in supporting roles, display a veteran's generosity with laughs, and Nunnally Johnson's script establishes him more solidly than ever as one of Hollywood's surest humorists. (Typical Johnson scene: a gruesome wedding rehearsal in a small-town church.)

Independent producers, however high-minded or mercenary their motives, seldom manage much of a splash, whether cerebral or boxoffice. International, founded by 20th Century-Fox's longtime general efficiency expert, William Goetz, and veteran cinelawyer Leo Spitz, onetime president of R.K.O. is an exception. Its first picture is the most propitious independent debut since David O. Selznick's.

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