New Pictures

The Forgotten Village (Kline; Mayer-Burstyn) is a documentary film of integrity and beauty, the story of the triumph of modern medicine over an archaic female herb doctor in the squalid village of Santiago, high in the mountains of Mexico's centra! plateau. Its post-production history is the triumph of reason over the paleolithic prejudice of New York State's three-man-four-woman board of movie censors, who banned the picture because it was "indecent . . . inhuman. . . ."

The civil-service censor board was reversed by the State Board of Regents after the film's makers, Producer-Director Herbert Kline and Author John Steinbeck, refused to delete two protested sequences: 1) a woman nursing her child; 2) a woman in labor. The birth is not shown --merely the medieval method of assisting labor by drawing a shawl tight across the fully-clothed mother's midriff.

Village is a study in faces--native Mexican mountain faces: strong-nosed, squash-nosed, distrustful, lucent and, except for the children, lined by labor. Its actors (all natives) are natural and astonishingly good, especially a mop-haired little boy (Paco), who dies of dysentery, and his older brother (Juan Diego), who makes the long hike to the city to return with the "horse-blood men"--Mexico's rural medicos and their vaccine.

Seldom exciting, Village has a well-sustained suspense arising from Santiago's struggle with the epidemic. The actors do not speak: the photography (Alexander Hackensmid) plus Actor Burgess Meredith's somewhat arty narration of Author

Steinbeck's script tells the lonely, moving story. Although the documentary's canvas is small, its preachment is vast. Its story in miniature is the story of the past reluctantly giving way to the future. Village succeeds in telling it with quiet dignity.

Only off-key note in the film is the background music. Written by left-wing Hanns Eisler, composer of the battle song Komin-tern, it is not Mexican, but an ultrasophisticated mixture of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Prokofieff. This was not the way Steinbeck had planned it. His first choice for composer was Mexico's famed Silvestre Revueltas, a man of Balzacian corpulence, Bohemian courses, and a gift for orchestration. At the climax of their negotiations the hard-drinking Revueltas--to Steinbeck's and Mexico's dismay --died at the unripe age of 40 years.

Sundown (Wanger; United Artists). In East Africa, sundown is the best time of the day. It is quiet then; night is near; and there is nothing to do. There, in a lonely desert outpost, Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Reginald Gardiner and other British colonials thwart a Nazi scheme to arm and rouse the natives, in ten reels of old-fashioned romanticadventure melodrama.

Through this dusty plot shuffles blue-eyed Gene Tierney, 21, cast as a sort of desert branch manager of a Bedouin A. & P. Co. chain. Supposedly a half-caste daughter of an Arab trader, she manages to remain as dead-pan as all good Arabs are supposed to be. Of course she turns out to be Miss Graham Fletcher, a British operative.

Producer Walter Wanger, holding tight to the theme of Author Barre Lyndon's original novel, worked overtime to plant his elaborate desert with oases of significance. He made the border skirmish part of Adolf Hitler's so-called plan of navy-less world domination (by conquering the European-Asiatic land mass, thus becoming independent of his enemies' sea power). He also furnished a flag-waving ending. Both devices are more embarrassing than exciting.

Silly sequence: weather-beaten old Harry Carey, cast as the kind of white trader he played in Trader Horn, ambles into the outpost, learns about the Nazi plot, and brain-waves: "We've got to set trap for trap!"

Shadow of the Thin Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is more aptly titled than was meant. This fourth working of a once-rich lode comes up with very little pay dirt. Its great-grandparent, The Thin Man, made as a quickie seven years ago, grossed a million or so dollars and incidentally delighted U.S. cinemillions with the brand-new Hollywood discovery that a man and his wife could be in love with each other.

In Shadow, the same couple, Nick & Nora Charles (William Powell & Myrna Loy), are still married, still in love, but the pace, bounce, snappy dialogue, the old fillip of murder and of amiable dipsomania have given way to resigned indigestion and middle age. Even Asta, their renowned beerhound who suffers nervous breakdowns, can pass a fire hydrant now without so much as an inquiring sniff.

Shadow tries hard to make exciting capital out of Private Detective Nick Charles's solution of the deaths of a jockey, a blackmailing reporter and a racetrack tout, occasionally succeeds, more often falls flat on its formula. Actors Powell & Loy do not try as hard as the rest, appear to be just going through the paces. Result: a typed who-done-it.

Week-End in Havana (20th Century Fox), Darryl Zanuck's third Good-Neighborly jaunt to a Latin American capital, is a Technicolored fortnight of lazing about, with songs, dances and Carmen Miranda. In its way, it is pleasantly subtropical.

Dead-pan Alice Faye shakes off her languor to give a reasonably presentable performance as a holidaying Manhattan salesgirl with a steamship agent (John Payne) and a Brooklyn Cuban (Cesar Romero) to see that she has a good time. She does.

Although most of the musical's score is feebly written, one tune (The Nango) is so enticingly illustrated by Miss Miranda and a very attractive chorus that it is almost worth the trip.

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