New Picture

So Ends Our Night (United Artists).

Montana's isolationist Senator Burton Kendall Wheeler one day last month threatened a legislative crackdown on cinemen for "carrying on a violent propaganda campaign intending to incite the American people to . . . war."

Quick to placate the troubled Senator were Hollywood spokesmen. Few anti-Nazi films were in production. Reason: from Warner Bros.' sensational Confessions of a Nazi Spy to Charlie Chaplin's $2,000,000 satire, The Great Dictator, anti-Nazi films have been disappointing at the box office. Reason: they were too depressing.

Released this week was an anti-Nazi picture, So Ends Our Night, that made producers hold their breath with suspense. Most expert piece of propaganda that has come from Hollywood so far, it may be the end of one anti-Nazi cycle or the beginning of another. So Ends Our Night is the work of an upstart team of independent producers: David Loew, onetime vice president of Loew's Inc., the theatre chain his father Marcus Loew founded, and Harvardman Albert Lewin, onetime instructor in English at the University of Missouri. Lewin was associate producer (with the late Irving Thalberg) of such M. G. M. hits as Mutiny on the Bounty, The Good Earth.

In tackling So Ends Our Night, Producers Loew & Lewin evidently tossed a large part of their Hollywood experience out the window, turned to European studios for guidance. It has the pace and scenic variety of a British thriller (The 39 Steps, Night Train}, some of the photographic intensity of pre-war French and German films. Unlike many previous U. S. anti-dictator films, it has maturity as well as indignation.

Moving from Austria to Czecho-Slovakia, Switzerland and France, So Ends Our Night is a story of the sad flight of the democrats from one brief sanctuary to another as Hitlerism rolled across Europe. When Josef Steiner (Fredric March), a former officer in the German Army, meets young Ludwig Kern (Glenn Ford), they are under arrest in Vienna, about to be put over the border into Czecho-Slovakia. Without passports, they have no civil rights, can be deported at any time. Without labor permits, they cannot legally earn a living.

Steiner slips back into Austria: he is hoping for some word from his wife (Frances Dee) who is still in Germany. Kern hopes to find his refugee father in Prague, finds him dead. But in Prague, at a boarding house for refugees, Ludwig meets Ruth Holland (Margaret Sullavan), a medical student until she fled from Berlin when her lover denounced her publicly as a Jewess.

Back in Vienna, Steiner buys a false passport, gets jobs for Kern and himself in the Prater, Vienna's famed amusement park. Ruth finds a job in a hospital. Then Hitler marches into Austria, and they light out once more. United again in Paris, Kern and Steiner work for awhile in a construction gang, Ruth in a laboratory. In France, too, there are restrictions against aliens. Ruth finds a way to evade them for herself and Kern. But Steiner, when he hears his wife is dying, goes back to her, to Germany, and to death.

Involved in this sombre hegira is a cast of 40 principals, including 55-year-old, Austrian-born Erich von Stroheim, playing the same impassive Prussian bully he has played since World War I. Surprise of the cast is Glenn Ford, a young graduate of the stage, who went to Hollywood a year ago, played a few minor parts, in So Ends Our Night does a bigger, not better job than either of its stars.

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