The New Pictures

Kukan (Adventure Epics; Rey Scott) is Chinese for heroic action. It is also a splendid 100-minute documentation of Cameraman Rey Scott's 10,000-mile journey through warring China. Filmed in Technicolor, it is a somewhat crudely made, vastly absorbing look at the forging of a new nation from the world's oldest civilization.

The obstinate, primitive, multimillioned man power that is performing this heroic transformation is Kukan's theme. These are people that most U.S. cinemaddicts have never seen or known. They are shy, handsome, aboriginal Miaos from the mountains of Kweichow; turbaned Mohammedans from Lanchow, heart of China's northwest frontier; greasy nomads from The Gobi; Lamas from Tibet; Hans; Manchus.

Kukan is loaded with the movement and color of their activities--training for the Army, endlessly building the Burma Road, bringing oil and gasoline and munitions from Russia by camelback, operating their vest-pocket industries, substituting their man power for gasoline and machine tools. All Chinese, they are an astonishingly jolly conglomeration of smiling, healthy people.

For its final 20 minutes, Kukan offers the most awesome bombing sequence yet filmed of World War II. The target is Chungking on Aug. 19 and 20, 1940. While scores of Japanese bombers poured some 200 tons of bombs into the defenseless city, Photographer Scott stood on the roof of the American Embassy 800 yards from the sector where most of them fell, and made his color shots. They are infinitely more frightening than a black-&-white bombing. The camera pans from the neat Japanese formations of 36 planes in threes in the blue sky to the crimson splash of bursting bombs, the lavender and purple clouds of smoke and debris, the dun-colored houses standing above the muddy river, to the bodies burned black in the white-hot ashes of demolished dwellings. Only thing missing is the red flash of anti-aircraft guns. Of these, Chungking had pitifully few.

The Big Store (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is supposed to be the final cinemappearance of the Brothers Marx. Henceforth they propose to apply their separate talents separately to whatever comes along. If Big Store is truly their swan song, it is a melancholy one.

Time was when the Marx Brothers' talent for violent lunacy whelped the belly-wrinkling hysteria of such superb stage and cinema farces as The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera. Big Store is just the Marx Brothers nostalgically going through the motions of helping Detective Wolf J. Flywheel (Groucho Marx), Housekeeper Wacky (Harpo Marx) and Pianist Ravelli (Chico Marx) catch a killer in the bargain basement. Absurdity (as in the incredible chase sequences) is substituted for comedy.

Groucho on the trio's retirement: "Our stuff is stale. So are we. . . . The fake mustache, the dumb harp player, and the little Italian who chased the ladies were funny at first. But it became harder with each picture to top the one before. To get out of the groove we have to get out of the movies."

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