The New Pictures

Michael Sirogoff (RKO) starts with a battle and ends with a siege. The body of the picture contains a massacre, a fight between a bear and a man, two horse-whippings, several murders, the spectacle of an executioner drawing a red-hot sword across a man's eyes and a sort of chariot derby between three-horse Russian droshkies. Winding through these and other divertissements, which make it easily the most eventful blood-&-thunder spectacle of the current season, is Jules Verne's 61-year-old story of a courier sent by the Russian Tsar to tell the Grand Duke, commanding an army at Irkutsk, that reinforcements are on their way to help him put down a Tartar rebellion led by Scarface Ogareff (Akim Tamiroff). Courier Michael Strogoff (Anton Walbrook) is spotted by Ogareff spies as he leaves St. Petersburg. Highlight of his journey is the day he spends at his home town of Omsk where he is taken prisoner and where his mother (Fay Bainter) and a girl (Elizabeth Allan), whom he has gallantly been escorting along the way, are present when Ogareff has his eyes roasted. The roasting produces no bad effects because Ogareff's mistress (Margot Grahame), who has fallen in love with the courier while shadowing him, bribes the executioner to do it inefficiently. Nonetheless, by the time he reaches Irkutsk, Michael is in terrible shape. His clothes are torn to ribbons and it is all he can do to jump on a horse and rescue the town from the Tartars, practically singlehanded.

Most interesting fact about the manufacture of Michael Strogoff is the fact that not only its big scenes--Tartar troops riding across the steppes, rout of the Tsar's regiments by Ogareff's cavalry--but almost all the outdoor sequences were actually filmed in Siberia, giving the picture a photographic validity that could not possibly have been duplicated in California where almost every foot of available landscape is already familiar to cinemaddicts. Second most interesting fact is that all this apparently expensive panoramic authenticity cost RKO practically nothing. Michael Strogoff was originally made in both French and German by Producer Joseph Ermolieff. RKO's smart Producer Pandro Saul Berman (Winterset, Swing Time} bought the U. S. rights to the picture for $75,000, but instead of showing it with subtitles or dubbed-in sound, he proceeded to remake it in Hollywood. Directed by George Nicholls Jr., and supervised by Ermolieff, the parts made in Hollywood are so shrewdly interwoven with those made in Russia that cinemaddicts will be unable to guess where one starts and the other stops. To make his coup perfect, Producer Berman imported famed Viennese Actor Anton Walbrook who had played the lead in the European version. In his first appearance on the U. S. screen, Actor Walbrook's performance suggests that he will be almost as good an investment for the long pull as the picture is for a quick turn. Most spectacular shot: Ogareff's signal to his troops to charge Irkutsk--an oil-flooded river in flames below the walls.

Nancy Steele Is Missing (Twentieth Century-Fox). To discover a new ingredient for the formula of cinema kidnapping is a feat that might well deserve an Academy Award. To succeed in presenting as a hero a kidnapper who will not only arouse the sympathies of the audience but do so without raising the hackles of the Hays organization is another. Nancy Steele Is Missing does both. Adapted by Gene Fowler and Hal Long from Charles Francis ("Socker") Coe's story, directed by George Marshall, it furthermore enables Actors Victor McLaglen, Peter Lorre and Walter Connolly, without much feminine support, to combine their highly diverse specialties effectively in an outstanding contribution to the cinematically rare genre of psychological melodrama.

Dannie O'Neill (Victor McLaglen) is a dullwitted, unruly, likable lout who, to express his distaste for war in 1917, can think of nothing better to do than kidnap the infant daughter of Capitalist Michael Steele (Walter Connolly). Capitalist Steele--in whose New York club O'Neill is a waiter--posts a $100,000 reward but before O'Neill can get around to collecting it, he is arrested for assaulting an Italian in an argument about war, sentenced to two years in the penitentiary for bashing the head of the policeman who arrests him. In prison, Dannie makes the acquaintance of a mild little man named Professor Sturm (Peter Lorre) who, when the rest of the inmates start a riot, shows his good sense by crawling under a table. When Dannie has 17 years added to his sentence for starting the riot, the Professor gets enough information about Dannie's past to cause him to be waiting furtively at the prison gates the day Dannie finally gets out.

The first thing Dannie does is to visit the friends with whom, posing as her father, he left Nancy Steele 20 years before. What effect the loyalty of Nancy (June Lang) to the kidnapper, who she thinks is her father, has on Dannie; what happens when he encounters Capitalist Steele; how the sinister little professor operates to get the reward which Dannie no longer wants, fit into a climax which, if not very plausible, is definitely unique. Good shot: prison inmates singing America at the news that the U. S. is in the War.

You're in the Army Now (Gaumont-British) is the one about the tough boy who joins the army by accident, finds it tougher than he is, becomes a new man. This time the hero is a smalltime U. S. crook named Jimmy Tracey (Wallace Ford) who lands in the British Army while escaping from the police. He falls in love with the Sergeant-Major's daughter Sally (Anna Lee), who is also loved by Private Bert Dawson (John Mills). After the usual scrapes, romantic interludes and brushes with his scandalous past, the trio is shipped off to China with the regiment. Climax is a brisk battle with a bandit army, at the end of which Bert gets the girl, Jimmy the medals, the audience boredom.

Fire Over England (London Films), not to be confused with Wings Over Europe, Wings Over Ethiopia, Storm Over the Andes, Storm Over Asia, Thunder Over Mexico and Head Over Heels in Love (TIME, Feb. 22), is Elizabethan sword & cloak drama, showing how the Spanish Armada was frustrated by young Michael Ingolby (Laurence Olivier) while Queen Elizabeth (Flora Robson) was feeding porridge to doddering Lord Burleigh (Morton Selten). In a hand-to-hand combat between Michael Ingolby and Michael Strogoff, the correct odds would be even money. In addition to burning the Armada with the aid of seven men in rowboats, Ingolby escapes from a Spanish galleon, sails in a fishing smack from Spain to England, foils an attempt on the Queen's life, uncovers a Spanish plot to assassinate her, impersonates a traitor to his land at the court of Spain's King Philip II, defeats the King's palace guard in a fencing match and accompanies his own songs on the Spanish guitar, in return for which he gets a title and the Queen's cutest lady-in-waiting (Vivien Leigh). Unfortunately, in its whole handsomely photographed gamut of daring deeds, the picture contains nothing as sporting as such a mythical contest might be. The onesidedness of Ingolby's encounters, combined with a certain stuffiness not wholly mitigated by having the Queen use such locutions as "You stink of fish" to her subjects, prevent Ingolby's escapades from being as exciting as those of his Russian rival. Typical shot: loyal Ingolby at a Spanish dinner party, evading a toast to England's downfall.

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