The New Pictures

Rio (Universal) is a bravely reburnished, expertly tinkered new version of an old story that looks like a trailer for Hollywood's current economy complex.*

When big-time Swindler Paul Reynard (Basil Rathbone) muffs that million-pound loan in London, his fussy French creditors threaten him with jail. Without batting a basilisk eye or ruffling a hair over his sinister profile, Swindler Paul explains to them that he forged the securities they hold for his prior loans; if they do not lend him 100,000,000 francs more, he will ruin them. This bit of blackmail lands Paul in Devil's Island. To Rio de Janeiro promptly dash Paul's dog-faithful bodyguard Dirk (rough-and-humble Victor McLaglen) to tend bar, Paul's lissome wife Irene (Sigrid Gurie) to resume her career as a cabaret songster, both to plot Paul's release.

But when a youthful bar-comber, handsome, down-&-out U. S. engineer Bill Gregory (Robert Cummings), insults Singer Irene, she falls in love with him. Her love saves Bill from his gin-&-bitter end, sets him to piping pure water from the hills (for the peons). By the time Dirk, rather tactlessly, brings Paul to Rio after his escape from jail, Bill and Irene, happy in the thought that jungle ants and vultures have done for Paul, are all set to marry. The Freudian knot is cut by Dirk, who grapples with Paul when he tries to shoot Irene, inadvertently makes the redundant husband shoot himself.

Here I am a Stranger (20th Century-Fox). Blubber-lipped David Paulding (Richard Greene) is a clean, upstanding, well-dressed boy with a veddy, veddy English accent and a brace of dimples he can switch on and off like headlights. His limpid life is complicated by a two-father complex. Father No. 1 (and sire) is Duke (pronounced Dook) Allen (Richard Dix), Stafford 1917, football, track, a brilliant writer who 20 years later is still winding up Chapter Four of his first novel. Father No. 2 is a famous lawyer (George Zucco) who married David's mother (Gladys George) after she left Duke for nonpayment of rent, has brought David up sheltered from the realities of life. A freshman at Stafford, David begins to sample the realities when, egged on by moony old Professor Dopey Daniels (Roland Young), he visits Father No.1, is shocked to find that life for Duke is mostly beer and victuals.

But when David begins to see that the world he has been brought up in is false, alas, he totes his bruised adolescence off to Father No.1, long since weaned from the bottle by David's influence and now a city editor. But to protect Father No. 2's in with his biggest client, Mother has already got to Father No. 1, who runs out on David. Disillusioned, with much boyish charm David tells Mother she has made a nice mess of both their lives. She packs him off "where he belongs," to Father No. 1, who never did run out anyway, is still a city editor. Good shot: the Professor's harum-scarum daughter (Brenda Joyce), who calls all her father's students "Fathead," hearing that Fatheads David and pal have read Joseph Conrad's Victory. Daughter: "Smart fatheads."

*Thrifty directors went to the ant while filming Rio. The prop list called for 10,000 ants to devour Cinemactor Rathbone and pal. When directors found ants cost five dollars a thousand in the ant market, they set honeypots out in the desert, soon caught so many big, red ants they did not bother to count them.

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