The New Pictures

Virginia (Paramount). Produced by Virginia-born Director Edward H. Griffith,* from a story he wrote with Virginia Van Upp, Virginia was filmed on the spot, in torrid, somnolent Albemarle County, where Thomas Jefferson lived and died. In spite of the labored accents of its non-Confederate cast (only Southern actor featured in Virginia is Tom Rutherford, a Richmond blue blood) its lines have an authentic ring, might have been copied down verbatim from the resentful speeches of Albemarle's land-loving inhabitants.

Virginia is a story of reconstruction--not the postwar reconstruction of carpetbaggers and night riders, but the 1941-type reconstruction of rich Yankee gentlemen who buy up crumbling Southern estates, restore them to their ante-bellum splendor, are thoroughly snubbed for their pains by clannish, unreconstructed neighbors. The neighbor in this case is Stonewall Elliott (Fred MacMurray), who lost his ancestral home when the bank foreclosed and sold it to a young Manhattan sportsman, Norman Williams (Stirling Hayden). They become two corners of a four-cornered triangle. The other two are Stoney's wandering wife, a man-crazy flibbertigibbet (never seen in the flesh) who once had an affair with Norman, and Charlie Dunterry (Madeleine Carroll), a Southerner reared in the north who comes back to have a look at her family homestead.

With appropriate complications, the story meanders on to its predestined end, with the help of a suicide, a hunting accident, a hidden cache of Confederate dollars, a gallant gesture by Yankee Williams. Tedious at times, Virginia at its worst is made bearable by luscious Technicolor shots of Madeleine Carroll and Virginia's red-clay country. For cinemaddicts who adore child actresses, Virginia makes the most of four-year-old Carolyn Lee. After Honeymoon in Bali (also with Carroll & MacMurray) Carolyn's steel executive father took her home to Martins Ferry, Ohio, was persuaded by Director Griffith to give her another whirl in pictures. But the real news in Virginia's cast is 24-year-old Stirling Hayden, who had never acted in anything before--not even a Sunday School pageant--when Director Griffith gave him his fat part in Virginia.

New Jersey-born son of a Manhattan newspaperman who died when Hayden was nine, he went to school in Maine, then went to sea. In a Boston fisherman he spent two years on the Grand Banks. For a few months he took fishing parties out of Gloucester on his own yacht, Vagrant, got his master's papers while he was working as a fireman aboard the steamship Florida between Miami and Havana.

As master of the schooner Chiva Captain Hayden traded through the West Indies. He took the 96-ft. brigantine Florence C. Robinson out to Tahiti. Two years ago, with a partner, he bought the schooner Aldebaran, built for Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (as the yacht Meteor III) before World War I. Hayden's idea was to start a passenger service between Hawaii and Tahiti. On his way to Boston to outfit her, Aldebaran ran into a gale off Cape Hatteras, crept into Charleston, S. C. a virtual wreck.

It was a Boston newsman who first wrote that big, bronzed Stirling Hayden, with his head of unkempt, golden hair, "ought to be in the movies." For months afterward hard-boiled sailors would shout at him across the water: "Yoo hoo! You ought to be in the movies!" When Hayden lost Aldebaran in Charleston, his friend Larry O'Toole, a Boston artist and member of the crew, remembered the newsman, looked him up, through him got in touch with a Hollywood agent. The agent took some photographs of Hayden to Paramount and showed them to Edward Griffith, who was at that moment looking for a man to play the second male lead in Virginia. Director Griffith liked Hayden's looks, gave him a test, signed him up.

Blue-eyed Newcomer Hayden is half Dutch, half British, looks a little like James Stewart. Biggest leading man in Hollywood (6 ft. 4 in., 212 lb.), he is taller than Joel McCrea or Gary Cooper, an inch taller than Fred MacMurray. Hayden's smooth job of acting in Virginia made him a star. His next picture, with Dorothy Lamour, will be Dildo Cay. Scene: a desolate island in the West Indies.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (RKO Radio) will be a shock to film followers who think that roly-poly British Director Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes) can do no wrong. His first comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is run-of-the-mill Hollywood farce, suggests that Hitchcock would do well to stick to melodrama.

To Mr. (Robert Montgomery) and Mrs. (Carole Lombard) Smith comes an embarrassed little man from the town where they thought they were married, to explain that they are not married at all, because of a legal technicality. To tease his wife, Mr. Smith puts off asking her to remarry him until she gets thoroughly fed up, tosses him out, refuses to marry him at all. Amusing to this point, Mr. and Mrs. Smith for the ensuing reels becomes a sly, exasperating chase, in which the frantic husband tries to recapture his wife, eventually (with the help of a pair of skis) succeeds.

High Sierra (Warner). After Prohibition the gangster as an everyday aspect of U. S. life began to go the way of the Indian and the cowboy. The most recent gangster picture to shoot its way out of Hollywood has less of realistic savagery than of the quaint, nostalgic atmosphere of costume drama.

A frankly historical picture, High Sierra shows the last haunted days of "the last great gunman," after the other big shots are gone--"dead or in Alcatraz." The story is classical in its simplicity. Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart), an aging desperado, sticks up a resort hotel in California and makes his getaway into the snow-topped Sierras. Hunted by a small army of policemen, he shoots his way out of one trap after another, is cornered at last, keeps shooting to the end.

What makes High Sierra something more than a Grade B melodrama is its sensitive delineation of Gangster Earle's character. Superbly played by Actor Bogart, Earle is a complex human being, a farmer boy who turned mobster, a gunman with a string of murders on his record who still is shocked when newsmen call him "Mad-Dog" Earle. He is kind to the mongrel dog (Zero) that travels with him, befriends a taxi dancer (Ida Lupino) who becomes his moll, goes out of his way to help a crippled girl (Joan Leslie). All Roy Earle wants is freedom. He finds it for good on a lonely peak in the mountains.

After hundreds of Argentines took excursions across the Plata estuary to Uruguay to see The Great Dictator, it opened after all in Parana, 410 miles up the river from Buenos Aires, in the tough, independent-minded Argentine State of Entre Rios.

* No kin to The Birth of a Nation's David Wark Griffith.

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