The New Pictures
The Body Snatcher (RKO-Radio) is a double-barrelled horror picture (Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) which Producer Val Lewton and his associates have developed from the Robert Louis Stevenson short story. Laid in Edinburgh in the 18305, it involves the tragic traffic of a young medical student (Russell Wade) and his brilliant teacher (Henry Daniell) with a grave robber who does not hesitate to murder when a cadaver is urgently needed for dissection.
Like all Val Lewton productions, The Body Snatcher shows a humane sincerity and a devotion to good cinema unfortunately rather rare in U.S. movies. In this case, however, much of the picture is more literary than lively and neglects its crass possibilities as melodrama. The exceptions provide an anthology of eminently nasty creeps and jolts. The sudden snort of a horse is timed to scare the daylights out of you; there is a grisly shot of Lugosi's slaughtered head, distorted beneath brine ; and the last passage in the picture is as all-out, hair-raising a climax to a horror film as you are ever likely to see.
San Pietro (Army Pictorial Service --War Activities Committee) is in every respect as good a war film as any that has been made; in some respects it is the best.
A 30-minute record of one of the tense and bloody battles for the Liri Valley in Italy in late 1943, it is a story told chiefly in terms of the experience of one infantry regiment -- the 143rd of the 36th Division.
For its remarkable honesty and excellence, honor goes to the Army; to Major John Huston, who directed it and who wrote and speaks its splendid narrative; and to the six cameramen under his command.
Time & again Huston led his men into no man's land hours ahead of an attack (once they were caught for hours in cross fire) ; constantly, he caromed from man to man of his small crew, guiding them to the best positions, the best shots. Day & night at odd moments during the fighting, Huston shaped and reshaped his scenario, and wrote his narration.
San Pietro's record of combat, its eye for terrain and for weather, its recognition of war as a science both wonderful and tragically inexact, are at least equal to any seen in films so far. But its great distinction is its constant, bitter, admiring, pitying awareness of human beings.
Its narration, a high-mettled, professionally military prose, delivered with quiet irony, is repeatedly given life and reso nance by images which show what "heavy seasonal rains" look and feel like to get a truck through, what Texan "elements" in a regiment are as people, something of what eleven hundred "replacements" mean in terms of death and survival.
The huge close-ups of the helmeted heads of infantrymen as they move into battle, or rest after it while you are told that many of those you watch are soon to die. have the simple immediacy of good family snapshots--and the enduring majesty of a heroic frieze.
Huston's treatment of a dead German, his blond hair blowing gently, and of the 700-year-old, shattered little town and its inhabitants, is no less devoted to human meaning. As he shows them, old men. women and children, draining townward out of their hill caves, clambering bewildered among their demolished homes. or being extracted from under the rubble of a late-exploding mine or trap, war takes on great and complex meanings. And in one long passage, free of comment, while the screen multiplies the Etruscan and
Renaissance faces of children and infants, their features luminous with hunger and portentous of the incalculable future, this record achieves pure tragic grandeur.
San Pietro is a very fine film. History is likely to recognize it as a great one.
The Southerner (United Artists] is cinema's first wholehearted attempt since The Grapes of Wrath to portray in stirring fiction the lives of real people, in a real world, using their courage against real difficulties. In what it tries to do and in much that it achieves, it is worth any dozen run-of-the-studio Academy Award Winners.
It is the story of one year in the life of a family of Texas cotton farmers: a sad, querulous, disintegrating old woman (Beulah Bondi), a young man (Zachary Scott), his wife (Betty Field) and their small children. This is the strenuous, upward year after they have climbed the rung from migratory labor to tenant farming. They are not, like the people in The Grapes of Wrath, caught in historical currents greater and crueler than they can fathom or successfully fight; mainly they are involved in a contest with the land and the seasons.
Their nearest neighbor (J. Carrol Naish) is a man so confused and embittered by his own poverty and ambition that he does his best to frustrate their attempt to better themselves. They get a derelict house into shape, desperately watch one of their children wither under pellagra, raise a crop they can be proud of, get drunk at a wedding in town, reassemble the pitiful remnants of their year's work after a cloudburst, and come into the fall of the year in a resolute, proud, sad knowledge of their lives which is granted to few except farmers.
Very few American moving pictures have understood so poetically such matters as the beauty and meaning of lighting the first fire in a new home; of using all your strength and sense in hard work and watching the tangible result; of cooking and eating the meat you have hunted and killed; or the anguish of watching all your hopes struck flat by one spasm of the sky.
In all of its intentions and in many of its best achievements The Southerner is profoundly honest, beautiful and satisfying. But it also has its faults. The main fault: the picture generalizes or misstates much that should be intensely specific. People who know the South well will sometimes wince; even people who do not know the South may find the picture not wholly convincing. Yet there is far more to be grateful for than to forgive, notably the work of Zachary Scott; of Jean Renoir, who wrote as well as directed it (the film is based on the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand, by George Sessions Perry); and of Photographer Lucien Andriot.
CURRENT & CHOICE
The Clock (Judy Garland, Robert Walker; TIME, May 14).
Counter-Attack (Paul Muni, Marguerite Chapman; TIME, April 30).
It's In the Bag (Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Robert Benchley; TIME, April 23).
The Enchanted Cottage (Dorothy McGuire, Robert Young; TIME, April 16).
Molly and Me (Grade Fields, Monty Woolley; TIME, April 16).
Without Love (Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy; TIME, April 9).
Practically Yours (Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray; TIME, April 9).
Fury in the Pacific (Army, Navy and Marine Corps film; TIME, April 9).
Colonel Blimp (Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook; TIME, April 2).
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