The New Pictures

Government Girl (RKO-Radio) bump-the-bumps its way with engaging roughness through the crowded bedrooms, offices and baths of wartime Washington. It is the first picture to be produced and directed, as well as written, by top flight Scripter Dudley Nichols. Nichols did not want the job, which was tossed into his lap, like somebody else's damp baby, and he is reported to be unhappy about the result.

An industrialist (Sonny Tufts) who has "kicked his way up through Detroit" comes to Washington with just one job in mind: to make as many planes as possible as fast as possible. Little things like swiping a trainload cf steel on which the Navy has priority do not upset him at all. But they do upset his delicious secretary (Olivia de Havilland). She, in turn, obscurely upsets her boss, who, with no time for love, undertakes a secret study of books like How To Be Happily Married. Miss de Havilland's boyfriend (Jess Barker), a smooth young attorney in search of scandal, is also interested in her boss. Investigated at long last by the Senate, Planeman Tufts is saved only by Miss de Havilland's impetuous glorification, before the Committee, of Men Who Get Things Done. Amidst the dramatic moments is a lighter passage which depicts the romantic leads running hogwild through the streets of the Capital on a motorcycle neither of them can operate.

Olivia de Havilland possesses all the personal charm of a marshmallow which can also cook. She also has distinct limitations as a comedienne, not much helped when she has to sob about Sonny Tufts: "He's just like a great big long-eared dog." Cinemactor Tufts develops a rich comic realism. His conventional pinstripes and orgiastic ties, his scuffed luggage, his interviews with various Washington bureaucratic heavies are bright enough bits of authenticity to delight any director. Agnes Moorehead, under Dudley Nichols' direction, turns in a portrait of a Washington wolverine which is a blend of comic-strip and Daumier. Paul Stewart, rescued from expert portrayals of smooth crooks, makes a small part as a newshawk the best thing in Government Girl.

WAC's Relief. Sonny Tufts, 29, is 4-F's gift to Hollywood. He stands 6 ft. 4 in his socks, bears down on them with 200 Ib. of well-balanced beef and bone. But under all this somatic splendor is a broken man: two shattered shoulders, two knees with floating cartilages, one cracked pelvis, one crushed hand. Causes: sports and fights from prep school on. When he first came up for the Army physical, Tufts was classified 1-B. He asked what that might mean. "It means," snarled a sergeant, "you can relieve one WAC for active service." The next time up, Sonny again recited his litany of disabilities. A draft official asked, "What do you do?" Tufts said that he worked for Paramount. "Oh," nodded the official, "stunt man." Said an attendant, as Tufts went out, a 4-F for keeps: "Don't sneeze, Bud, when you're going down the stairs. You might fall apart."

Sonny began life as Bowen Tufts III, in Boston's Back Bay. The family missed the Mayflower ("Reservations too crowded," explains Sonny), but has been in the country since 1638. A great-great-uncle founded Tufts College. When Sonny saw his first play, he piped his desire to be an actor. "It's all right to be an actor," said his broadminded banker father, "if you're a good one."

At Phillips Exeter Academy, Sonny skiied, footballed, got up his own band. At

Yale also Sonny broke bones and beat drums. He played football, was on the third varsity crew. He was theater critic for the Yale News. As "The Meyer Davis of Yale," he organized some five dance bands, one of which he took on 22 Atlantic crossings. One night he heard Tito Schipa sing an aria and decided to be an opera singer. By 1936 he wangled an au dition at the Metropolitan, but when he discovered the small size of his starting salary, he gave in to an offer to appear in the Elsa Maxwell-Leonard Sillman Who's Who. Who's Who did not turn out to be Sonny. He played another musical, began singing in nightclubs like Manhattan's Glass Hat, Famous Door, and Beachcomber. He might still be 1'ving on his larynx if a friend had not said to him : "Sonny, I can't understand why you're not in pictures." Neither could Sonny, so he went to Hollywood. For his screen test he chose a solemn chunk of Liebestod which had originally been strained through velvet by Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, played it for laughs. When he saw Sonny's test, Producer Mark Sandrich, who was looking for a lackadaisical Kansas Marine for So Proudly We Hail, nearly rolled out of his chair. Government Girl is Sonny's second picture. His next: ILove A Soldier.

The Cross of Lorraine (MGM) is a remarkable melodrama about a cruel and magnificent subject--escape from a German military prison for French soldiers.

The French prisoners and their captors might easily have been just another set of theatrical animal-crackers. Acted and directed as they are, they tell a good deal about the courage and fear of men confronted by a calculated effort to destroy or misuse their manhood.

The Quislingesque wine-merchant (Hume Cronyn) who from the first plays ball with the Germans is not just a sniveling traitor. The roots of his spirit are so atrophied that he is sincerely baffled by the loathing of his fellow-prisoners.

The quietly intrepid priest (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) is no showy hero. He tries to conduct a religious service strictly on the sly; it is only when his death stares him in the face that he stands erect and prays aloud.

The valiant taxi-driver (Gene Kelly) who rushes at the priest's killers with his bare fists, takes everything his torturers can give him in solitary confinement--and utterly loses his courage. The Spaniard (Joseph Calleia), the only prisoner who is politically as sophisticated as the Nazis, is cold-blooded in his preference that the broken taxi-driver should die rather than return to infect his comrades with despair. The young bourgeois lawyer (Jean Pierre Aumont) is horrified when his fellows plot to kill the wine-merchant without a trial, yet he succeeds him as a trusty. He manages to negotiate an escape for several of his friends, yet cannot bear to break jail himself unless the tortured taxi-driver has the daring to come with him.

The Nazis seem equally lifelike. The Commandant (Tonio Selwart) is wholly uninterested in cruelty for its own sake.

He is just a scientist in sadism, with a job to do. He tosses a loaf of bread into the dirt among a crowd of starving men, not for the fun of it, but in order that they shall dive for it, fight, divide and degrade themselves.

But the picture's action is not as expert as its characterizations. Towards the end it begins to fall apart. The escaped prisoners whip up a very well-filmed insurrection among French villagers and lead a retreat to join a highly fictional guerrilla army."Let's scorch the earth!" cries implausible Housewife Emma Dunn. They do--and a good deal of the picture's force and persuasiveness go up in smoke. Otherwise, The Cross of Lorraine (which takes its name from its undergrounders' Guallist password) is one of the best war films that has been made in the U.S.

Cry Havoc (M.G.M.) has lost its most blood-chilling cries--the offscreen screams of the U.S. nurses on Bataan surrendering to the Japanese, which were a high point of the stage play. The cryless Cry Havoc is a less sensational So Proudly We Hail (TIME, Sept. 27). It is harsher and more perfervid than Paramount's star-struck version of nurses on Bataan.

The nurses in Cry Havoc are a quiet, middle-aged captain (Fay Bainter), a lieutenant (Margaret Sullavan) who, though fever-ridden, refuses to quit, a veteran volunteer (Marsha Hunt), and a rather luscious, well-intentioned lot of newcomers whose chief qualifications for the job are their good intentions and a dabbler's acquaintance with first aid. Short of medicine, food, sleep and experience, they do what they can when the Japanese bomb their hospital, strafe their open wards.

Later they pass up their last chance to escape to Corregidor, give themselves up to the enemy at the bitter end.

More personal drama is supplied by an English girl who is caught underground among corpses, loses her mind; by a sensitive socialite (Ella Raines) who is machine-gunned while she is taking a swim; and by a tough, intransigeant jill-of-all-trades (Ann Sothern) who tries to steal Lieut. Sullavan's man until she learns that they are secretly married. At one badly taken point Joan Blondell, as an easygoing stripteaser, shows her roommates how she used to do her act.

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