The New Pictures

Anna Karenina (Korda; 20th Century-Fox) is the latest movie version (there have been four U.S. ones) of Tolstoy's lesser masterpiece. It is by far the costliest ($2,000,000) but far from the best.* Sir Alexander Korda and his British bankers provided the money; France's famed Director Julien Duvivier (Pepe Le Moko, Panic) contributed' his talents.

With so much dough riding the throw, Duvivier carefully hedged his bet. His script tore down Tolstoy's complex scaffolding of historico-religious theory, eliminated the subplots, preserved only the central study of a falling woman, with a few glimpses of the high society she fell from. This might have been sufficient if the film had also saved a suggestion of the dreadful glacier-creep of Tolstoy's characterization. Instead, the camera work is uniformly uninspired, and the psychological glacier dissolves into teary slush.

Vivien Leigh is lashed about by the tremendous role of Anna like a pussy cat with a tigress by the tail. She is not assisted by a script which insists on sentimentally ennobling one of fiction's most vehemently average women. Irish-born Kieron Moore, Britain's newest cinematinee idol, is badly miscast as the debonair Vronsky; he appears to be an idol with feet of peat. The principals suffer further by comparison with Sir Ralph Richardson, whose Karenin fairly lumps out the screen with its three-dimensional reality.

Are You With It? (Universal-International) is a cinemusical about a tent show. The show's supercarnival acts, which had a rich midway glamor on the Broadway stage, have only a cheap midway glare when filtered through the screen. But Song &-Danceman Donald O'Connor comes through brightly as a sort of low-glazed, hickory-cured Danny Kaye.

State of the Union (M-G-M). In Howard Lindsay & Russel Grouse's Pulitzer Prize satire, a number of political animals (a presidential candidate, professional politician, lady publisher, big businessman, labor leader, etc.) were herded into a sort of literary abattoir. There they were bludgeoned with ridicule, skewered with wit and butchered with invective; the raw meat was flung to Broadway audiences who ate it up for almost two years. Finally, the whole delightful shambles was tossed (for a down payment of $300,000) to The Great Knacker, Hollywood.

After a good look at the purchase, the studios involved (Liberty Films and MGM) had corporate nausea. The satirical carnage involved, and might antagonize, every major force in the nation's political life. Luckily, the movie was being made by a cinemagician who could turn bludgeons into lollipops--Producer-Director Frank (It's a Wonderful Life) Capra.

Capra made a few passes and presto! 1) much of Lindsay & Grouse's dialogue disappeared, and the cutting edge was flaked off; 2) the gadfly-buzz of the play's action slowed to a snore. To sustain the illusion of interest, Wonder-Worker Capra relied on a blaze of star-power: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Van Johnson, Adolphe Menjou, Angela Lansbury. But Tracy, as in all his recent pictures, lacks fire; Hepburn's affectation of talking like a woman trying simultaneously to steady a loose dental brace sharply limits her range of expression; Johnson, playing a Drew Pearsonish columnist, is no more effective than Pearson would be playing Johnson; Menjou (in a double-breasted vest) is rather more Menjou than politician. Only Lansbury, whom Metro has long dieted on lean parts, does any real acting. As the adderish lady publisher, she sinks a fine fang.

The real wonder-workers turn out to be Lindsay & Grouse. It is a tribute to their skill that, even after all Hollywood has broken loose, State of the Union is still a mildly entertaining movie.

Berlin Express (RKO Radio), which RKO shot mostly in Germany, is really two movies--one in the background, the other in the foreground. The background is an album of postwar Germany: a series of malignantly beautiful photographs of rubbled cities, taken with a depth of focus that clarifies the fear in every handful of dust. Unfortunately, the view of this film is frequently obstructed by the one in front of it, which has a certain frightful clarity of its own. It concerns an American (Robert Ryan), a Briton, a Frenchman and a Russian who unite to rescue a famous advocate of Peace (Paul Lukas) from the Nazi underground, but then ride off in opposite directions, leaving him alone. For moviegoers who can't fathom this deep one, RKO provides explanatory comment that gets pretty far down.

RKO's experiment in shooting chunks of Berlin Express abroad was part of the new trend. In addition to such Continental productions,** Hollywood expects to make about twelve A pictures in Britain, several in Mexico (where The Fugitive, The Pearl and Treasure of Sierra Madre were shot last year), and more pictures than ever before "on location" all over the U.S.

Why the rush to get out of Hollywood? There are three reasons: 1) moviegoers (and good moviemakers) are showing revived interest in films shot in real settings; 2) labor and production costs fall off sharply outside the U.S. (some German extras work for as little as two cigarettes a day); 3) in Britain and on the Continent, one of the best ways for U.S. film companies to use their blocked dollar earnings is to shoot movies there, then ship them back to the U.S. for release.

For RKO and Producer Bert Granet, there were special reasons for going to Berlin. Says Granet: "We could never have made the picture if we'd had to duplicate the ruin and devastation of Germany. I figure we got about $65 billion worth of free sets . . ."

* Two better ones: Love (1927) and Anna Karenina (1935), both starring Greta Garbo.

** Italy has the heaviest schedule: Columbia plans to make four more opera adaptations there (next: Faust), Edward Small is completing Cagliostro, 20th Century-Fox will film Prince of Foxes.

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