The New Pictures

The Plough and the Stars (RKO) is Dudley Nichols' adaptation of Sean O'Casey's famed play about Dublin's Easter rebellion in 1916. As the prize exhibit in the repertoire of the Abbey Players, The Plough and the Stars long ago achieved the rating of a contemporary classic. Its grimy and discursive picture of Dublin life, as background for the grim story of its principals, made it a contemptuous portrait, almost a definition of Ireland before the Free State. The current version of The Plough and the Stars--in which Director John Ford was assisted by Arthur Shields of the Abbey Theatre and in which five members of the Abbey Theatre make their first U. S. cinema appearance together--is considerably less than that. Nonetheless, changed, abbreviated and tautened to suit the tastes of the U. S. cinema audience, it remains a dark and ferociously exciting melodrama, well worthy of comparison with Director Ford's 1935 contribution to the same subject, The Informer. Theme of the 0'Casey version of the play is the tragic muddleheadedness of the revolutionists, the Irish romanticism that made their rebellion fizzle off in ranting, saloon fights and ill-timed heroics. In RKO's The Plough and the Stars the theme is the considerably less specialized one of conflict between love and patriotism. Jack Clitheroe (Preston Foster) and his wife Nora (Barbara Stanwyck) are assing in the park when he is summoned to his post as commandant of the Irish Citizens Army. Nora, who has already tried to keep him at home by destroying notification of his commission, sees him out with bitter apprehension. The I. C. A., under General Connolly, captures the Dublin post office.

Jack is in the foolhardy garrison that holds it for three days against British artillery fire. Meanwhile, life goes on even more squalidly than usual among the lodgers in the Clitheroe rooming house. When rebellion degenerates into looting of Dublin stores, Fluther (Barry Fitzgerald), the barfly, takes advantage of his opportunity to erase his tab at a pub, fill his pockets with bottles. Bessie Burgess (Eileen Crowe) makes off with a baby carriage, a bird cage and an armful of finery.

Dispatched from the post office to bring help, Jack takes to the roofs. When he gets through a trap door in his own attic, with British soldiers at his heels and others coming up the stairs, the household is assembled for a wake for little Mollser Gogan, dead of consumption. Quick-witted Nora saves her husband's life by hiding his gun in Mollser's coffin. When the British soldiers break in a moment later, Jack is squatting beside it, playing cards with his cronies.

Less incendiary than its original, which caused a riot when first presented in Dublin, this version of The Plough and the Stars, spoken in brogue that is not too thick for intelligibility, offers the most illuminating glimpse of Ireland's fight for home rule thus far included in Hollywood's dossier on the subject. Good shot: Fluther's technique in a barroom fight-- fantastically complicated footwork, accompanied by no blows. A Doctor's Diary (Paramount) is a savagely derisive expose of conventional medical ethics, fairly screaming the sort of hospital anecdotes which upright members of the profession refrain even "from whispering. Its casting is as daring as its contention. Producer B. P. Schulberg has staffed it almost entirely with unknown players. John Trent, a self-assured young man of likely starring calibre, was until recently piloting a TWA transport. Ruth Coleman is an erstwhile commercial artist model. Helen Burgess is a Paramount stock player also new to the screen. Key situation of A Doctor's Diary is the villainy of Dr. Ludlow (Sidney Blackmer) who postpones an operation on a boy violinist to attend to a rich client. Because of the delay the fiddler loses the use of his playing arm. Dr. Dan Norris (John Trent) threatens to testify against Dr. Ludlow, losing thereby his job and his fiancee, Catherine Stanwood (Ruth Cole-man), daughter of a hospital owner. Trent transfers his interest to Ruth Hanlon (Helen Burgess), a nurse who expressed unethical annoyance when surgeons refused to operate upon a dying patient although the doctor on the case was an hour late. When an infantile paralysis epidemic breaks out, Trent retracts his testimony against Ludlow so as to continue his research, serves humanity, marries Ruth. David Boehm's hard-hitting screen play is far better craftsmanship than the ponderous directorship of Charles Vidor. Flying to Hollywood, Producer Schulberg's attention was attracted to dark John Trent, .who suggests a cross between Richard Barthelmess and George Raft, in the coffee shop of the Kansas City Airport. When a female passenger said audibly: "That's a dish!" Producer Schulberg offered him a job. Trent's real name is Laverne Browne. Son of an Orange County, Calif, orange grower, he took up aviation while at college, barnstormed through Virginia, got a pilot's license, spent one year on TWA's New York-to-Kansas City run, year-and-a-half on the Kansas City-to-Los Angeles. He has flown 600,000 miles without an accident, still has a TWA job as reserve pilot at $1 a month, is afraid to ride in taxis. Asked how he felt after his first studio work day, Cinemactor Trent replied: "Like a cocktail that has been left standing on the mantelpiece all night." Join the Marines (Republic) takes itself much less seriously than most of it? predecessors in the recruiting-poster school of cinema. Told with an absolute minimum of bugle-blowings, flag-hoistings and en masse exhibitions of clean-limbed young U. S. manhood, its raffish story of an ex-policeman's career in the employ of the U. S.

Navy Department makes surprisingly good entertainment. En route to the Olympic Games as a javelin thrower, Phil Donlan (Paul Kelly) unwisely lets himself be involved in a shipboard party celebrating the elopement of two of his fellow passengers. Their marriage fails to materialize but he gets tossed off the Olympic squad and out of the New York Police Department for drunkenness. When it turns out that the young lady (June Travis) responsible for his predicament, daughter of a hard-boiled colonel of Marines, is in love with him, Phil enlists under her father but any chance that this will mean a premature solution of the plot's romantic elements is speedily destroyed by the fact that Colonel Denbrough's eagerness to have his daughter marry a marine is equaled only by her determination to do nothing of the sort. By the time a satisfactory compromise is reached, Phil has worked himself up to a lieutenancy through a riotous career on a Pacific island where his most spectacular achievement is reorganizing a native village on the lines of an East Side precinct, complete with fruit stand graft for his best friend (Warren Hymer). Good shot: a native mutiny ending when Donlan picks up the spears thrown at him by the natives, entrances his assailants with a demonstration of his superior skill.

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