The New Pictures

The Fight for Peace (Warwick) is a bitter, angry omnibus of war, given point & purpose by a tart narrative from the pen of author Hendrik Willem Van Loon. These patched-fogether newsreel shots show actual scenes from modern war: liquid fire spraying Ethiopia; China's cities, roadsides and streams piled with stinking dead; anguished Spanish mothers digging their mangled children from smoking ruins, as big, black bombers wheel off overhead.

Stuff for sturdy stomachs only, The Fight for Peace is a sardonic documenting of the worldwide toll war has taken since the War to End War took 8,538,000 lives, maimed 21,000,000. Its purpose polemic, the film studs its narrative with jaw-jutting shots of Mussolini, pose after pose of Hitler giving an almost epicene version of a Nazi salute, bike most articulate protestants against the way of the world, the makers of The Fight for Peace tell only what they want to tell, but their film hits home with a sickening thud. Some memorable scenes:

P: From the Russian revolution: a jerky, 20-year-old shot, shown before in the U. S. in Tsar to Lenin (TIME, March 22, 1937) of the execution of nine men, three at a clip. Standing on the brink of a deep, wide grave, they face the firing squad stolidly. When the guns bark, their caps fly off, they double up with comic strip grotesqueness, topple into the grave.

P: From the sack of Shanghai (TIME, Sept. 13): the dead being flopped into trucks like limp loads of fat codfish; the scorched, wailing baby in the railway station square, quite alone except for acres of dead and the newsreel cameramen.

Stolen Heaven (Paramount) is the first picture in which snub-nosed Olympe (pronounced "oh lamp") Bradna, chubby faced Parisian brunette, has been starred. In preparation for this great event, Paramount floated the innocent fiction that Olympe had never been kissed. Alleged reason: Olympe is 17 and her mother will not leave her alone with a man until she is 18. To this baseless canard, Olympe last week chirped an exception. In a film called College Holiday (TIME, Jan. 4, 1937) she had been kissed in a purely businesslike way by a juvenile named Louis Da Pron. About her private life, she was less explicit. "I am only 17," said she demurely, "and I have to do what my parents tell me. . . ."

Her first camera kiss as a ranking star, however, is given to Gene Raymond while the two of them, cast as a pair of jewel thieves, are hiding from the police in the house of a once-famed pianist (Lewis Stone). During the starry embrace the dark-eyed maiden shows no lack of promise.

Stolen Heaven is more likable than most gem-thievery pictures because its pattern is fringed with immortal music. The characters hide behind doors and talk crook lingo while the sound track throbs with Liszt, Chopin, Grieg, Moszkowski, Strauss. The music is introduced by having the pianist practicing incessantly for a promised return to the concert stage. Best number: a montage giving an idea of what Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody might look like if sounds were pictures.

Kentucky Moonshine (Twentieth Century-Fox) presents the Ritz Brothers bodaciously aping the feuding, corn-swilling hillbilly-o of the cartoon-strip clan. For the most part a lather of Ritz-Brother grimacing and guggling, this Hollywood picture of hillbilly doings is typically untypical.

Most notable feature of Kentucky Moonshine is its eclectic way with contemporary genius. When the Ritzes bustle around redding up their cobwebby mountain cabin, the score plays Snow White's Whistle While You Work. When the boys make the grade as radio performers, their main act is a takeoff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with Harry Ritz metamorphosing himself from the Queen into the Witch, while the others take turns being Dopey, Doc, the Huntsman, and the Imp of the Mirror speaking with a Yiddish accent.

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