The New Pictures

Algiers (Walter Wanger) sets its scene in the bizarre crookedness of Algiers' shuttered, cluttered, labyrinthine native quarter, the Casbah. It is the story of the defeat of a magnificent criminal ego. Whimsical, moody, brutal Pepe le Moko, a jewel thief from Paris, is safe as a fugitive just so long as he stays in the Casbah. Knowing this, patient Policeman Slimane baits him with the thesis that the Casbah itself is his prison, then calmly watches and waits while this disturbing seed takes root. The lure to break prison comes in the shape of an incredibly beautiful woman. When Pepe accepts this fatal gambit, Slimane is strangely sad. The game is too soon, too unexpectedly, over.

Actor Charles Boyer's confident, romantic, tragic Pepe le Moko, and Joseph Spurin-Calleia's unhurried, calculating Slimane are cinememorable. So are Director John Cromwell's handling of this strangely fraternal, chaseless man hunt, and such intense scenes as that in which an informer (Gene Lockhart), backing away in terror as his executioners advance, jars a mechanical piano into action, dies to a ragtime tune. But best of all is the smoldering, velvet-voiced, wanton-mouthed femme fatale of Algiers, black-haired, hazel-eyed Viennese Actress Hedy Kiesler (Hollywood name: Hedy Lamarr). Her coming may well presage a renewal of the sultry cinema of Garbo and Dietrich. Hedy has been chiefly famous for her appearance, nude, in the Czechoslovakian film Extase, produced in 1933 by young Director Gustav Machaty as "a sermon in eugenics," exploited wherever U. S. cinema censors permitted, a picture which had one exquisitely played, if adulterous, moment of passion.

Year after she made Extase, Actress Kiesler, daughter of a Viennese banker, married Austrian Munitions Tycoon Fritz Mandl. He made her quit acting and by last summer, after their marriage was dis solved by the French courts, had spent nearly $300,000 trying to take Extase out of circulation. Last fall Hedy popped up on the Normandie under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, on landing stole some of the spotlight from such noted fellow voyagers as Danielle Darrieux, Fernand Gravet, Ambassador Bill Bullitt.

Thereafter, for seven months in Hollywood she did no cinema work, living first with Hungarian Ilona Massey, then in a simple, six-room bungalow in Beverly Hills, polishing her English, training her speaking voice, observing Hollywood ways. She swam, batted tennis balls, expertly-played her piano, stole the show at a few beauty-ridden Hollywood parties, to which she was squired at times by Rudy Vallee, Howard Hughes and lately by Actor Reginald Gardiner. When last April Producer Wanger borrowed her from M.G.M. for Algiers, it was discovered that she would require padding to fill out her bust --a deficiency no cinemogler had noted in Extase. In her first seven months in Hollywood, 23-year-old, five-foot-seven Hedy had lost 15 of her 125 lbs.

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