Orient Express

"The average American believes everything he sees in the movies," complacent Belgraders were informed last week by their favorite newsorgan Politika. Since the article was promisingly headlined American Film Lies About Yugoslavia, the Belgraders read on through a leisurely, contemptuous castigation of Fox Film's Orient Express:

"As the express draws into the station in Subotica (with the station name in Cyrillic and Latin script!) a Yugoslavian soldier boards the train and inexcusably in the roughest way, with no explanations, arrests the two Americans and the Slav. ... In the middle of the room officers are sitting around a large table eating. They throw bones on the floor, drink wine and lick their fingers! This abominable scene filled the American public with wonder and at the time caused merriment and hilarity. The officers speak half Serbian and half English! . . . The fugitives travel by automobile toward Belgrade. On the way they see a company of Yugoslavian troops approaching. The chauffeur stops the car and says. I am pretending there is something wrong with the motor, for if the soldiers see a good automobile they immediately will steal it.' "

Not deigning to apply epithets to such a film, dignified Politika urged the Yugoslavian Government to deal with Fox Films in the fashion of Polish Dictator Pilsudski: "Last year Warner Brothers made a film in which two gangsters had Polish names. . . . Poland promptly banned all Warner Brothers films and continued this ban until the company issued its unqualified apologies."

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