The New Pictures

Saratoga Trunk (Warner) has been packed by expert hands with practically everything a film needs for a triumphant box-office tour. In the top drawer of this expensive portmanteau, Ingrid Bergman is wonderfully bewitching in a black wig and bustle, and Gary Cooper drawls and sprawls in his best skin-tight cow-pants. Edna Ferber's plot slides them expertly through a period-piece romance without missing one of the primary Hollywood emotions.

The Trunk contains plenty more: lush late '703 settings of exotic Old New Orleans and gaudy, naughty Saratoga. There is even a spectacular railway wreck and a skull-crushing pitched battle in the dark. Most surprising thing about Saratoga Trunk is that it is not in Technicolor. Also surprising: despite its tried-&-true formula and two-hour-plus running time, Saratoga Trunk is a glamorous double portion of consistently entertaining entertainment.

Actress Bergman is mainly responsible. As Clio Dulaine, exiled with her mother to Paris by her father's starchy family, she returns to New Orleans after her mother's death with her pretty teeth sharpened for revenge. She gets it by the rather oversimple expedient of making a public scandal of herself with a Texas gambler named Clint Maroon (Gary Cooper). But Clio's calculated bitchery proves too much for the simple gamblin' man who wanders in & out of her bedroom like a cow-country Casanova. He checks out for Saratoga, which seems to be full of millionaire suckers. Clio hastily settles her blackmail deal for a deflationary $10,000 and turns up at the United States Hotel with a phony title.

From that point on, things work up to the big night of the fancy dress ball, when all the climaxes come to a head simultaneously and the picture nearly splits at the seams under the strain.

Ingrid Bergman is that rarity in Hollywood--a good-looking woman who can change her personality to suit her part. As Clio, freed from the virtuous nobility of her usual roles, her brilliant act of sexy razzle-dazzle makes most of Hollywood's glamor girls look like bobby-soxers.

Most exciting shot: Bergman at the piano singing French-Creole songs to Cooper in a manner to make less stalwart he-men wilt. Most amusing tableau: the head-pivoting "parade" of beruffled Clio, followed by her grim mulatto maid, followed by an impish dwarf.

The Last Chance (MGM International) is a Swiss film about the escape of a handful of international refugees over the Alps from Italy to Switzerland. Based on facts, and cast with real emigres and internees, most of whom had never acted before, the movie has an eyewitness ring, and it elevates one small aspect of the war to a parable of the whole. In working with untrained actors and an untamed landscape, veteran Swiss Producer Lazar Wechsler kept his story skillfully simple, his camera work properly unsophisticated. The result is no Grand Illusion (TIME, Sept. 26, 1938), but it is an earnest and unassuming film which will be remembered.

The story: two prisoners of war, a U.S. sergeant (Ray Reagan) and an English lieutenant (John Hoy) escape from a German train when it is wrecked in Italy. An Italian priest shelters them at an Italian border town, along with an English major and a group of old men, women and children who are fleeing from all parts of Europe. The priest begs the soldiers to take his little band along with them. The soldiers are frankly reluctant. Says the American sergeant: "I came here to fight, not to look after a lot of jerks." But morally there is no choice.

The camera is mostly a witness, rather than a commentator, of the long, bitter trudge through the snow. It stays with the hunted to the end, never abandoning them for the hunters. The result is a visual log of escape.

In the eyes of the Swiss, other nationalities look like amiable caricatures. The British are monstrously controlled, the Serbs exuberant, the Italians volatile, the Poles melancholy, the Americans breezy. But running from a common enemy, they take on a further dimension of single humanity in which the similarities of goodness and cussedness seem more meaningful than all the difference. Like the worn-out clothing in which they had fled from their homelands, national eccentricities are frayed at the edge: only the common body of humanity shows through.

The Sergeant. T/Sgt. Penrose Wiley (Ray) Reagan (rhymes with pagan), 20, should have written his own lines. Cast as the film's comic relief, Reagan's line of chatter sounds a little stiff. This is not surprising. His gags were written originally in German, translated by an English lady ambulance driver who had visited the U.S. before the war and was not quite up on the idiom.

The Sergeant was shot down while returning from a B-17 raid over Munich, was interned in Switzerland. He only went to Zurich for a screen test because it gave him two days away from camp and he wanted to encourage a G.I. friend to try out for a role. But Ray got the job, five months in Zurich and 125 francs a month for expenses.

When Ray left high school in 1943 to join the Army Air Forces, he had no plans for the future. Now he wants to go to Hollywood, and maybe some time return to Zurich. What he liked in Switzerland: watches, women, and, "for some reason, boiled milk." What he didn't like: cold weather, barley soup, and "the moral police" whose slogan was "Fun's fun, but let's not throw beer on the ceiling." His attitude toward a movie career: "A nice racket. Has a lot a guy could use."

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