The New Pictures

The Battle of Russia (Special Services; Army Service Forces) is the most eloquent film yet made about Russia's part in this war. It was made for U.S. soldiers (it is the fifth of the Army orientation films*) but it has just as much to tell U.S. civilians.

Colonel Anatole Litvak, who made The Battle of Russia, is Russian-born, but his nostalgic love for Russia and its people is uncomplicated by political finepoint. As a director in France, Colonel Litvak made one of the best screen romances (Mayerling). As a director in Hollywood, he found out (All This and Heaven Too, This Above All) what U.S. filmgoers want to see. Colonel Litvak's special qualifications converge, in Battle of Russia, to create a superb and deeply moving film.

The Battle of Russia moves in three great waves of action: the first seven months of invasion; the siege of Leningrad; the Stalingrad campaign. There are serious weaknesses: figure-skating around the Russian Revolution and the German-Soviet Pact which Sonja Henie could envy; blurring into romancing (as in some specious shots of gibbeted civilians); surprising failures to make the most of great material (Leningrad's fortitude is reinforced by only a hint of Leningrad's semistarvation). But overall and in most of its detail the film has remarkable power. Its power results from a simple fact: the greatest shots from Russia's great war records, out of which The Battle of Russia is made, are never used merely to tell a story, never for propaganda, always for the maximum of human and emotional force. Literal sound and suggestive music are used in the same way.

Samples:

> Russians, most of them elderly, their faces drawn, stiff, heartbroken, seek among frozen corpses for those who were dear to them. In an intensifying series, the shots show: a dead mother and baby, so frozen that the child's head stands rigid in the air above her bosom; an old woman, crying and stupefied, trying to limber the upthrust frozen arm of a dead man.

> Even music--which usually drowns moving pictures in sugar--adds greatly to this one. The sudden naive, triumphal avalanche of scales which opens the finale of Tschaikovsky's Fourth Symphony--used here at the moment when the tide turns against the Germans at Stalingrad --is an astute and thrilling use of cinemusic.

I Dood It (M.G.M.) To spite a faithless fiance, a dancing actress (Eleanor Powell) marries a man (Red Skelton) who, she believes, owns a gold mine. She kicks him out when she learns that he is really a pants-presser, grabs him back when he foils a saboteur's attempt to blow up a munitions warehouse.

While this musical-comedy plot thickens to the curdling point, a good many variously gifted people are kept busy making the show entertaining. Jimmy Dorsey's band establishes one hit (the smoothly meandering Star Eyes) and one bidder (the galumphing So Long, Sarah Jane). Hazel Scott blends swing and quasi-classical music to the disadvantage of both and the delight of millions. Comely Lena Home proficiently marshals Count Basic's band and numerous choristers through a particularly unpleasant stretch of sub-operatic Africorn about the walls of Jericho. Eleanor Powell, who is the best female tap dancer on tap, proves it in a rope dance, a modified hula and a rampant straight number on a milk-white stage battleship. But Red Skelton is the best bet of all.

Most of Skelton's comedy is Bob Hope laid on with a ball bat. Red goofed up over a kiss, Red getting off lines like "I press men's pants but this is the slack season," appeals chiefly to the primordial. But now & then Skelton's broad and cheerful silliness--notably in one stretch of pantomime, upholstering himself in a false beard--comes so thick & fast that the effect is like being held down and tickled.

His Buter's Sister (Universal) first appears with her back to the camera, walking through a train. As she passes, the faces of male passengers light up as if she were at worst an improvement on Botticelli's Venus. Then she turns around. She is Deanna Durbin, ready to burst into song at the tap of a baton.

Miss Durbin portrays a young middle-western lady with an ambitious voice. She wants nothing so much as a chance to display it before Hit-Composer Franchot Tone. Her surprise and delight may be imagined when she discovers that her brother (Pat O'Brien) is the boozy butler of Composer Tone's Park Avenue penthouse. But it is Butler O'Brien's special business to keep thrushes out of this quiet nest, and for several reels Miss Durbin, though she crowbars her way into a maid's job there, has to content herself with charming some comic local lackeys and an eager Broadway producer (Walter Catlett). At last, at a Butlers' Ball, she utters some high notes which pierce the heart of her brother's boss. She also sings a slice of hickory-smoked Victor Herbert and an aria from Puccini's Turandot with her familiar verve. But as the verses go on, on, on and, by way of variation, on, some customers may feel that Art is the longest distance between two points.

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