The New Pictures

The Moon Is Down (20th Century-Fox) presents the cinema audience with a ready-made controversy. As novel and play, John Steinbeck's fable about a Nazi garrison's nervous breakdown in Norway kicked up a loud literary row. Were Steinbeck's Nazis softer than the real thing?

They are harsher in the movie than in the novel or the play, and so is their dramatic impact. In the movie (scenario by Nunnally Johnson, who also did Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath) the camera witnesses many important events that take place offstage in the play. The picture shows the Nazi invaders' confident march into the mining village of Selvik, their mowing down of a pitiful dozen of Norwegian soldiers, the villagers' terror and confusion. Then, in the sharp language of action rather than introspective comment, it describes the villagers' growing hatred and resistance, the Nazis' growing fear.

Good scene: lined up for execution, five Norwegians begin to sing their national anthem. A machine gun stills their song. After a silence, a new voice begins, and the song rises stronger than before from the throats of the whole village.

Henry Travers does an excellent job as the fumbling, humbly heroic Norwegian mayor; so does Dorris Bowdon (Mrs. Nunnally Johnson) as the slayer of a Nazi officer who tries to seduce her. In the story's most controversial role, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, as the Nazi commander, looks more like a cold-blooded Junker than like the unmilitary officer described by Steinbeck.

The chief interest, with the movie as with the book and play, lies in Steinbeck's central thesis: that Nazis are vulnerable to hatred and contempt. The more the picture attempts to make this theme explicit, the more it underlines the fact that Steinbeck's premise is questionable psychology. Conquerors do not expect to be loved, and seldom go to pieces because the conquered fail to embrace them. The Moon is Down may seem to many audiences an extraordinarily naive view of the facts of Nazi life.

Steinbeck's story has had the attention that a pertinent argument deserves. As a book it sold nearly 1,000,000 copies and as a play, after a poor start on Broadway, where it ran only nine weeks, it was a smash on the road. Twentieth Century-Fox paid Steinbeck a record $300,000 for the movie rights.

Flight for Freedom (RKO-Radio) centers around the expansion of Japanese power in the '30s. The U.S. needs a plausible reason to photograph the Japanese-mandated islands from the air. Suppose the Navy had to search for a famous woman flyer lost in that neighborhood?

This celebrity (Rosalind Russell) has been through: 1) heartache for a highflying airman (Fred MacMurray); 2) balm in the arms of a more securely grounded plane designer (Herbert Marshall). Undertaking the Government's secret instructions to lose herself and her plane, she is very, very much surprised to find that her navigator is to be Fred MacMurray. She also learns that the Japanese will find her before the U.S. Navy does. On a New Guinea hotel veranda, to off-stage sounds of tropical storm, she perceives that the way to serve her two men and her country is to make a solo disappearance.

The film makes a good technical try for pace, but never really achieves it Russell's and MacMurray's thanks-for-the-memory love junket is as bland as anything the Hays office has swallowed in recent months. But mainly the picture is as uneven as a war-torn corduroy road. Once, its taste graph dips so low as to show a group of flyers in a back room saluting Rosalind Russell with song:

"She's a highflying, rollicking swell; Here's to our Tonie! Don't she look well!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.