Offensive

According to the Gallup Poll, 84% of U. S. citizens want Germany to lose World War II, and Hollywood is no more neutral than anyone else. But Hollywood is in business, and the strongest superstition of the augurs and warlocks who preside over the industry's trade journals and nurture the industry's various hunches about what the U. S. public wants is that it does not want "war pictures." What this category includes, outside bad pictures like Beasts of Berlin and Confessions of a Nazi Spy, no one knows, but fact remains that few producers have been anxious to find out. Last week came two more feelers. In themselves two pictures do not make a cinema spring, but their reception might hasten one.

The Man I Married (20th Century-Fox), whose title was changed from I Married a Nazi, owes its impact to a simple and startling idea. The idea is to show Hitler's Germany not through the eyes of a German or a Jew, but of the screen's most Typical American Girl, smart, slapdash, big-eyed Joan Bennett. When Miss Bennett, for all the world like the heroine of a Gary Grant comedy, slithers up a Berlin street in a low-slung roadster and comes upon a gang of Storm Troopers beating a few old Czechs, the smash is terrific.

Without realizing that they have made their point, the producers of The Man I Married then go on to labor it by: 1) bringing in a U. S. newshawk (Lloyd Nolan) to act as a sort of male Dorothy Thompson; 2) making her husband (Francis Lederer) not only a Nazi but a philanderer. The Man I Married will remain notable for one monumentally silly line. When Miss Bennett finally walks out on her Hitler-happy husband, she sticks out her right arm, shrills: "Heil, heel!"

Pastor Hall (United Artists) is redder meat. Its central character, loosely drawn from famed jailed, nonconformist Pastor Martin Niemboeller, is a man whom the Nazi whirlwind strikes where it hurts most, his conscience. When Storm Troopers move into the drowsy little village of Altdorf to give it some political training, Pastor Hall (Wilfrid Lawson) tries hard to understand what the new gospel is about. What happens when he does, and winds up in a concentration camp, is uncomfortably close to modern crucifixion. Released by his friends, Pastor Hall is about to escape when across the street he hears the bells of his old church, knows that he must walk back to his pulpit once more. The subject of the last sermon which he delivers, while his enemies wait outside the church, is that he and others like him are waiting, too.

English-made. Pastor Hall is introduced in a prologue by Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt (burden: Pastor Hall is more important than Hitler), is the first picture presented to the U. S. by James Roosevelt. Globe Productions, in which Jimmy is associated with onetime Universal Executive Henry Henigson, has a franchise to distribute pictures through United Artists. Its next release will be Pot o' Gold (based on the radio program), being produced in Hollywood by a Rumanian-born quickie expert. Samuel Bronston.

Since Jimmy left his $30,000-a-year berth as vice president of Samuel Goldwyn. Inc. (which has suspended production pending the outcome of a legal fight between Movieman Goldwyn and his United Artists co-stockholders), he has also been working on a scheme to make shorts to be exhibited in vending machines (TIME, March 4). Meantime he has moved from his Beverly Hills house-awf-swimming pool to a modest apartment on the other and wrong side of town, now keeps no servants, drives his own car. Says Jimmy: "Joe Kennedy* once told me, 'There are only two pursuits that get in your blood--politics and the motion-picture business.' ''

*Ambassador Kennedy helped organize R. K. O., was once an executive of Pathe, producer for Gloria Swanson.

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