The New Pictures

1812 (Mosfilm) is the most ambitious Soviet fiction film to reach the U.S. since the war began. It is not to be compared with the dynamitic masterpieces of Eisenstein or Dovzhenko; but even in decline the Russians can show the world a thing or two about movies.

Too busy at the real thing to throw much paraphernalia into make-believe, Director Vladimir Petrov and his associates boil their war down pretty close to its essence: a duel of mind and spirit between Napoleon, who understood little except warfare, and the apparently sleepy Field Marshal Kutuzov, who understood his country and his people so profoundly that he all but embodied them. It was Kutuzov almost alone who realized that a Napoleon who had attained his goal, yet could neither engage in battle nor negotiate peace, was only a demoralized, helpless trespasser.

Much of this subtly simple story is told through leisured close-ups of faces so well cast, in the Moscow Art Theater tradition, that they embody nations, passions, methods, doubts, like great restrained cartoons. These faces discuss the situation, and advance the story, with considerable dramatic intelligence. Napoleon's occupation of Moscow, and his catastrophic retreat, are child's play compared with their handling in Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. But the retreat does have a certain grandeur, resembling that of the florid, romantic, 19th-Century military art from which its cinematic style is apparently derived.

An American Romance (MGM) is a $3,000,000,151-minute, Technicolor "epic" of the U.S'. steel industry. Producer-Director King Vidor, one of Hollywood's abler craftsmen (The Big Parade, H.M. Pulham, Esq.) and most earnest innovators (Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread), took fire 18 years ago with the idea of filming a U.S. history in terms of steel. He eventually ignited Louis B. Mayer, too. But the resulting conflagration is a one-alarm blaze, at best.

Unhappily lacking the guidance of a book of Pulham's caliber, Vidor and his writers made up their own story. Its outline is familiar. Immigrant Steve Dangos (Brian Donlevy) walks the thousand miles from Manhattan to his first job in Minnesota's iron mines in 1898.

Nourished by reading, freedom and the love of an Irish schoolteacher (Ann Richards), Dangos' drive carries him onward & upward from the mines to the mills. He names his children Thomas Jefferson Dangos, Abraham Lincoln Dangos, etc., becomes a citizen, loses a son in World War I. As more & more steel flows into mass-produced automobiles, he becomes a motor magnate. At film's end, his airplane assembly line is helping to win World War II.

Without benefit of plot, suspense, or believable people, this glorification of the American dream has the stiff unreality of a daguerreotype reproduced and brought to life in some of the finest Technicolor photography of U.S. industry yet filmed.

From its early shots of the milewide, purplish-red wound which is the Mesabi Range's largest open-pit mine, to the closing clocklike surge of B-17s off their production line into the sky, An American Romance is a cameraman's field day.

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