The New Pictures

30 Seconds Over Tokyo (M.G.M.) is a very sincere effort to do something almost hopelessly difficult on the screen: to remain true to a true story. In every respect this effort to tell the truth about the Doolittle raid is a tribute to the patience of its quiet, thorough producer, Sam Zimbalist; in many respects, it is successful.

The picture is perhaps farthest from conviction in its rather overwritten love scenes, though these are played with unusual heart and simplicity by Van Johnson (as Lieut. Ted Lawson) and a talented, sensitive newcomer, Celia Thaxter (as Mrs. Lawson). It is best in its flying scenes--above all in an ambitious sequence which purports to take a low-flying bomber all the way from the deck of the Hornet to the roofs of Tokyo.

For Lieut. Lawson and his crew, the raid ends in wreckage and agony on the China coast. Guerrillas help the broken men inland. Chinese doctors do all they can with heartbreakingly scanty medical supplies. Gangrene develops in Ted Lawson's leg; by the time an American doctor reaches him, there is nothing to do but take it off. In a shot which M.G.M. had the creditable courage to leave in the picture, despite preview complaints, two nurses carry the grim weight of the leg away down a corridor.

At length the survivors are assembled safely, and flown back to the States. In Washington's Walter Reed Hospital, Lawson at last sees his wife again. As she comes through the door he stands up from his wheelchair--forgetful of his lost leg--and falls, gruesomely hard, in the most shocking and piteous moment any American war film has yet dared to exhibit.

The acting honors in this film go to several Chinese patriots, without acting experience, whom Producer Zimbalist and Director Mervyn LeRoy recruited chiefly in San Francisco--a literary scholar, a dealer in antiques, etc. In their probity of demeanor and feeling, they offer a beautiful testimonial to their nation, and testify, as well, to the magnificent possibilities of using non-actors far more generally in films. The acting of the professionals (including Spencer Tracy as Colonel Doolittle) is also sincere and creditable. It is most pleasing, perhaps, in the case of Van Johnson, whose handling of his largest and most serious role to date is wholly admirable.

"I hope it lasts." When 28-year-old Van Johnson steps out to fetch his milk off the doorstep these morings, he runs the chance of finding, as well, some disarming child in bobby socks who has traveled all the way from Idaho or Missouri or Maine just for the meeting. When he goes to take part in radio shows, he is well-hedged by policemen; they are necessary because young people mob him for any souvenir they can lay hands on. Johson's mail, at present, tallies some 8,000 letters a week--the highest mail count of any star in Hollywood.

The storm center of Johnson's popularity seems to reside so firmly among girls below the age of consent that he is sometimes described as the voiceless Sinatra. Johnson's attitude towards this sudden, enormous popularity is rather baffled ("I can't pick my nose in public any more"). Equally, it is frank and heartfelt: "God," he says, "I hope it lasts." He understands his fans all the more sympathetically because he is still a celebrity hound himself. To meet Ronald Colman is still a breath-taking event for him.

From Newport to Hollywood. Van Dell Johnson, of Swedish extraction, was brought up in Newport, R.I. At 19 he abandoned a boyish ambition to be a trapeze artist in favor of a theatrical career in New York. The career, such as it was, lasted six years. It wound up in Hollywood, under contract to Warners at $300 a week, with little work and less attention. Johnson was about to leave town when Lucille Ball gave him a fight-talk and an introduction to Metro.

His first real break was as the juvenile lead in A Guy Named Joe. After two weeks' shooting he was in an auto wreck, got a hole punched in his skull and his brain punched full of roadside gravel. But the Joe company voted unanimously to keep his role on ice for his recovery. And the accident, like the war (for which it incapacitated him) is, he realizes, as responsible for his popularity as his own personableness, which is considerable, and his seriousness about his work, which is boundless.

Marriage v. Career. Sobered by his accident, and intensely ambitious, Johnson lives even more simply than the average young star. His agent allows him $25 of his comparatively modest $750 a week for spending money; the rest goes into War Bonds and toward buying a house. He gets to bed by nine each working night, studies his script for an hour, smokes his one cigaret of the day. By mid-afternoon each day his right eye begins to droop and he has to take time off ; another result of his accident is an all but continuous headache.

Johnson continually asks advice about his work, never asks it about his private life, which appears to be as conservative as his custom of keeping his car keys safety-pinned inside the breast pocket of his coat. He invariably falls for every girl he plays opposite, and would like to marry and settle down. But childhood with a divorced father and his serious attitude about his career have combined to make him cautious about women. He likes his drinks straight when work will permit but enjoys, more than anything else, watching movies. He was so dissolved by Going My Way that he had to sit halfway through another picture before he could leave the theater.

The Great Moment (Paramount), a singularly confusing yet likable little comedy-drama about the fumbling and fighting which attended the discovery of anesthesia, is more interesting in its past vicissitudes than in its present form.

It began as a book, Triumph over Pain, by Rene Fueloep-Miller. After two scenarists had taken a shy at making it into a screen play, it fell to the brilliant Preston Sturges (Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero}. As Author-Director Sturges finished it, it was a sharp and memorable refutation of the assumption that Sturges is incapable of ever flatly committing himself about anything. It opened with a leisurely, mock-pastoral shot of a weedy grave marked "W.T.G. Morton, Born 1819, Died 1868," and with a clear pleasant voice which addressed the audience as follows:

"One of the most charming characteristics of Homo Sapiens--the wise guy on your right--is the consistency with which he has stoned, crucified, burned at the stake and otherwise rid himself of those who consecrated their lives to his further comfort and well-being so that all his strength and cunning might be preserved for the erection of ever larger monuments, memorial shafts, triumphal arches, pyramids and obelisks to the eternal glory of generals on horseback, tyrants, usurpers, dictators, politicians, and other heroes -who led him, usually from the rear, to dismemberment and death.

"We bring you the story of the Boston dentist who gave you ether. Before whom in all time surgery was agony. Since whom science has control of pain. It is almost needless to tell you that this man, whose contribution to human welfare is unparalleled in the history of the world, was himself ridiculed, burned in effigy, ruined, and eventually driven to despair and death by the beneficiaries of his revelation."

The original picture bore out, in some eleven reels, this bitter preface. After being dubiously received at a sneak preview it was drastically cut, by Sturges, according to the desires of his employers. In its present mutilated nine-reel state, the picture will probably do its best service if it interests cinemaddicts in reading the book on which it is based.

Even so, it is by no means without interest and a certain charm. Dr. Morton (Joel McCrea) is Sturges' least caricatured, most straightforwardly sympathetic hero to date. Some of the comedy, supplied chiefly and expertly by William Demarest (the picture is reduced largely to its comic episodes), is funny if you can enjoy laughter in contexts of physical misery. Some of the drama, supplied by McCrea, by Louis Jean Heidt as Horace Wells (who discovered the anesthetic possibilities of laughing gas) and by Harry Carey as Dr. Warren (who first used anesthesia for surgery), is firm, humane and moving.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Meet Me in St. Louis (Margaret O'Brien, Judy Garland; TIME, Nov. 27).

None But the Lonely Heart (Gary Grant, Ethel Barrymore; TIME, Nov. 20).

The Woman in the Window (Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett; TIME, Nov. 6).

Mrs. Parkington (Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon; TIME, Oct. 30).

To Have and Have Not (Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall; TIME, Oct. 23).

Battle for the Marianas (U.S. Marine Corps; TIME, Oct. 2).

Casanova Brown (Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Frank Morgan, Patricia Collinge; TIME, Sept. 18).

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