The New Pictures

Blood on the Moon (RKO Radio) is a cow opera in which even the cattle behave convincingly. When they stampede, they look less like a spectacle than just a big nuisance. The bad men (Robert Preston, et al.) are also believable. Before Cowpoke Robert Mitchum gets mixed up in plot, he has a friendly shooting match with the rancher's daughter (Barbara Bel Geddes). She snipes at him as he tries to ford a stream. He retaliates by shooting the heel off her boot. At some point in this exchange of lead, love blossoms.

Blood on the Moon contains some of the oldest trappings in horse opera, but the performances make the difference. The heroine looks as if she might really live on a ranch, and like it; the hero has plausible motives for shooting when he shoots. They contend with the villains against handsome outdoor backgrounds.

Director Robert Wise has avoided much of the flavor of hokum by handling his gunplay as if it were something really necessary, rather than a Fourth of July display. His actors use horses because they seem to want to get somewhere; they come out of brawls looking mussed. Even Walter Brennan, a master of easy tearjerking, plays this one fairly straight.

You Gotta Stay Happy (Rampart; Universal-International) is a harmless and mildly entertaining little movie--unless it is butterfly-broken on the wheel of Social Significance. * It has lost none of its gloss in translation from a slick-magazine serial to the screen. Smoothly mounted, directed and acted, it is a pat little story about a painfully earnest flyer (James Stewart) who is running his small-time airline straight into bankruptcy. Then he takes aboard a runaway millionheiress (Joan Fontaine).

Adding up the payload for a single westbound flight, Pilot Stewart finds on his bill of lading: the blonde, who is a truant from her honeymoon, an escaping embezzler (Porter Hall), a G.I. and his bride, a corpse, a shipment of whitefish, some live lobsters and a cigar-smoking chimpanzee. Before the flight has ended, the passengers have jounced through a forced landing (made partly because of weather, partly to pick up a few rustic gags from amiable Farmer Percy Kilbride, who keeps the New England accent flying in darkest Oklahoma), and reached several forced decisions.

This is the kind of role that Jimmy Stewart could play blindfolded, hog-tied and in the bottom of a well. He gives it all the best Stewartisms, and modestly allows adequate working room to Copilot Eddie Albert and half a dozen other skilled troupers (notably Roland Young and Willard Parker). As a comedienne, Joan Fontaine tries out a new set of mannerisms, most of which seem to have been borrowed from Jean Arthur.

Miss Tatlock's Millions (Paramount) gives Writer-Producer Charles Brackett another chance to practice his favorite sport of skating on dangerously thin ice. Brackett and his fellow worker Billy Wilder are virtually the only Hollywood practitioners, since the penalty for breaking through the ice is almost certain professional death. Brackett and Wilder have already managed to make movies around such dynamite-loaded topics as divorce, alcoholism, adultery-plus-murder, illegitimacy, the black market in Germany.*

In Miss Tatlock, Brackett breaks three major movie taboos: a little fun is poked at insanity, the plot contains a suggestion of incest, and a pair of unregenerate frauds are treated with sympathy. By good humor and skillful gags he manages to avoid giving too much offense. His main device is humor, backed by humaneness. He makes the imbecile (John Lund) likable; he rouses pity for the girl (Wanda Hendrix) who believes, mistakenly, that she is falling in love with her dim-witted brother; and he makes a fair case for the idea that his swindlers (Lund and Barry Fitzgerald) are more admirable than the pack of voracious relatives who are snarling over scraps of a great estate. Ilka Chase and Monty Woolley are a help in waspish supporting roles.

Hollow Triumph (Eagle-Lion) is the rather listless story of a gentleman-gangster (Paul Henreid) who puts himself on the spot by robbing a gambling joint. He is menaced from every side by bullets until he finds shelter under the long, protective arm of coincidence. He discovers that he has an exact double in town--a Dr. Bartok, psychoanalyst. Jittery Gangster Henreid decides to murder Psychoanalyst Henreid and take over his job beside the couch. He learns, through hard experience, that neuroses can be as dangerous as guns. Joan Bennett is the doctor's pretty, hard-boiled secretary. She and Henreid have some fairly good dialogue to exchange and they frequently pour real warmth into their roles; but neither can quite cover up the empty echoes in Hollow Triumph.

*Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, To Each His Own, A Foreign Affair.

* As the New York Star's reviewer tried to do. He jeered: "Cheer up, all you young women with $80 million. Happiness can be yours, anyway."

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