The New Pictures

The Woman in the Window (International) is a psychological thriller that tops anything in its line since Hitchcock's Suspicion. As the second time at bat for the newly formed producing team, International Pictures (TIME, Sept. 18), it marks another clean hit by Producer-Author Nunnally Johnson.

Johnson starts his story like a batter lazily warming up. Professor Wanley (Edward G. Robinson), a humdrum family man, stops on the way to his club to gaze at a glamorous portrait in a gallery window. When the portrait's model (Joan Bennett) turns up and they fall into conversation, the professor feels he is on the brink of adventure. Throwing caution to the winds, he goes to her apartment--quite literally to look at etchings. But when the girl's lover bursts in and attacks him, Wanley in self-defense stabs him to death with a pair of scissors.

From that moment, neither Wanley nor the girl nor the audience know a moment's peace. The professor's decision to dispose of the body and his meticulous efforts to obliterate all trace of the murder make a tale that hovers on the edge of panic. Resolving to be cool and sensible, Wanley commits every blunder in the books. With the body crumpled in the back of his car he very nearly gets arrested for driving through a red light. At the parkway tollgate he manages to drop his dime in the road. As he fumbles for another coin the tollkeeper pokes and pries about the car, helpfully looking for the lost coin.

Finally arrived at the sanctuary of his club, the professor is seized upon by his closest crony, the District Attorney (Raymond Massey). To entertain Wanley, who seems distracted, the D. A. regales him with the developments of the sensational new murder. Detail by detail the professor is forced to listen to a relentless but far-from-boring reconstruction, from footprints, spots of blood and bits of hair, of the crime he has committed.

Aided by Actor Robinson's restrained and realistic performance, the pressure of Producer Johnson's story mounts almost to the breaking point. Then, like a decompression chamber to a diver with the bends, a skillfully managed trick ending brings relief.

Tall in the Saddle (RKO-Radio) is a western omelet made of the traditional ingredients and served up with a trifle more than the traditional style and fun. A hard young newcomer to town (John Wayne) renders a bruising account of himself in barroom, street and poker brawls, smokes out the skunk who killed his boss and, in the course of preventing a dove-soft eastern girl from being cheated of her inheritance, learns that he himself is the rightful heir to the K.C. Ranch. By this same bold fiat of plotting, which slices the Gordian knot paper-thin, it is also shown that he and the young lady are cousins, ineligible for wedlock. This leaves the weather clear and the track fast for a neck-and-neck finish, shared by Mr. Wayne and a fierce, rough-coated local filly (Ella Raines).

Tall in the Saddle and 500 other westerns are almost, but not quite, as indistinguishable as so many Lincoln pennies. What distinguishes this one is its discreet overall sense that the cast-iron predicaments, incisive fights, violent equitations, munificent landscapes and hay-stuffed creatures of such operas can be invested with some feeling both for humor and for authenticity. In advancing this idea, casually argued at best, the most efficient debaters are: 1) John Wayne, who is cinema's ablest proponent of rawhide masculinity; 2) neon-eyed Ella Raines, the most human and promising of the young sub-stars; 3) whiskey-whiskered, exuberant "Gabby" Hayes, the most expert old-timer in westerns, who looks rather like Walt Whitman endorsing picnic twist.

What To Do with Germany (MARCH OF TIME) asks the question, but does not stay for an answer. Its glances at the fast, present and probable future of the world's most recidivist nation should stimulate audiences to ask themselves the same question. It should also, by the revelation of a startling statistic which shows Germany's manpower potentially far exceeding any of its neighbors' by 1970, make them realize the importance of a prompt and effective answer. With a graphic explanation of Sumner Welles's partition plan, and a passing nod to the views of Walter Winchell, Lord Vansittart and John Foster Dulles, M.O.T.'s own implicit answer is: "Be stern."

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