The New Pictures

A Guy Named Joe (M.G.M.) is about a guy named Pete (Spencer Tracy).* Pete destroys a Nazi flattop, crashes and dies in the doing, soon finds himself in a lot of handsome mist, renewing that license to make pictures about the Hereafter which has lain fallow since Here Comes Mr. Jordan. It is Pete's business, his ghostly General (Lionel Barrymore) informs him, to join other dead airmen in teaching fledglings how to fly and fight, and to act in general like a genial anti-gremlin.

Invisible and inaudible to everyone except the audience, Pete takes in hand a young worrywart named Ted Randall (Van Johnson), and teaches him to relax, to quit reading books and make up to the girls around the USO, to fly like the flying fool Pete was himself. Over in New Guinea to help the boy through his first fighting, Pete sees his teaching bear saddening fruit. Pete's ex-sweetheart, a ferry pilot (Irene Dunne), is still trying to get over his death. Under Pete's invisible nose, she and Pete's star pupil flirt, make love, become engaged. But she is still in love with Pete's memory. So Pete frees her of his influence. He takes her high in the air to hear "the music a man's soul sings to his heart" (composed by Herbert Stothart). When they land, she is ready for Captain Randall and for Pete's quiet tagline: "That's my girl. And that's my boy."

In its highly romanticized and somewhat overlong terms the picture is a sincere wartime homily on some of the nobler aspects of death, tradition, bereavement. It would succeed more thoroughly if Miss Dunne's grief and her scenes with Van Johnson were not--apparently for Pete's sake and the audience's--so smoothly soft pedaled. But Miss Dunne's early scenes with the living Pete have unusual friendliness. Spencer Tracy, as usual, is extremely competent. Director Victor Fleming's flying and combat scenes are exuberant. The picture's original ending, in which Miss Dunne died heroically and joined her former lover, had to be changed. M.G.M. found that preview audiences emphatically preferred a Johnson in the hand to a Tracy in the clouds.

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"Nothing, practically nothing" is Spencer Tracy's rather muted description of what he has been up to since his last film, Keeper of the Flame, appeared almost a year ago. Actually, he has had his hands rather full. Shooting on A Guy Named Joe, which was interrupted by Van Johnson's injuries in an auto wreck, has kept Tracy tied up for eleven months.* When he was not shooting he has been 1) doing camp tours (one to Seattle, one to Arizona), 2) opening a war chest drive in Denver, 3) visiting hospitals, 4) doing radio broadcasts to servicemen overseas, 5) appearing regularly at local camps, 6) singing Pistol Packin' Mama to soldiers, 7) teaching the song to Gary Cooper, who is now, Tracy says, singing it to troops in the South Pacific.

In time off, Tracy plays tennis with his son Johnny, clacks with his boyhood crony, Pat O'Brien, talks with Victor Fleming about horses and about the war career of their close friend Clark Gable. A nonstop gum chewer and candy nibbler who describes himself as "a box of chocolates broadened out into a character actor," Tracy has recently lost weight (8 Ib.) because war has drastically curtailed his formal supply of sweets.

Busy on The Seventh Cross and assigned to 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, Tracy hopes to quit pictures as soon as possible. He wants to do war work and nothing else, preferably overseas. He has on hand a piece of music and narration by Aaron Copland, called Lincoln Portrait, which he would like to do for soldiers in contrast to the always welcome--but never varied--song, dance and horseplay. "Get a little serious with them," he says, "and I think they'll like it."

The Desert Song (Warner) lingers melodiously on from the days (1926-27) when it was a Broadway operetta and the fractious Riffs were all that most people knew about in North Africa. It tries hard to be immediately prewar, with cracks about Vichy and a Nazi plot to put a rail road across the Sahara to Dakar. But it remains an amusingly archaic, Technicolored story about an indolent U.S. cafe-pianist (Dennis Morgan) and a Riffhounding French officer (Bruce Cabot), who are rivals for a French songstress (Irene Manning). This triangle is menaced by El Khobar, masked leader of the intransigent Riffs. But the pianist (who once fought for Loyalist Spain) turns out to have quite a way with the natives. El Khobar is not so black-hearted as black-faced and vocal. He and his tribesmen sing practically everything except Been Wukkin' on de Railroad. In the long run El Khobar is exonerated, the pianist gets the girl. The one bit which heartily commends The Desert Song to a world at war is a sizzling dancer (see cut, p. 94), by name Sylvia Operte who really hits the ouled-nail on the head.

Letter to a Hero (RKO-Pathe) is written by a small-town schoolteacher (played by Ann Dere) to an erstwhile pupil, a soldier who has just been decorated. While the soldier--whose face never appears--reads it, her voice speaks it. While she speaks, the camera wanders gently and perceptively among the people and places to which she refers--the classroom, the main street by day and by night, the church, the school bus, the soldier's home (a farm) and his parents, the war work of various auxiliaries, a Friday night dance at the High School, a parade which culminates in the dedication of Roll of Honor, in tribute to the young men who are away at war.

The teacher's letter is a quiet and homely report on the state of the nation for which he is fighting. The camera makes that report simple, straightforward and clear as only a camera can. If the report were less unqualifiedly contented, it would gain in power; but it has a good deal of power as it stands. Larry O'Reilly, who wrote and photographed the film, has not tried to beautify the faces of real townspeople, and the face of a real town (Monroe, N.Y.), which are beautiful in their own right. As a result his quiet little 20-minute film is, photographically, one of the few memorable jobs done in 1943 on the home front.

Riding High (Paramount), with Dorothy Lamour, Victor Moore and Dick Powell all astraddle it and spurring like mad, gallops through some handsome Technicolored Arizona landscapes and fetches up nowhere in particular. Originally, Paramount planned a film about the Calgary Stampede. What emerges is a complicated musical involving a show girl (Dorothy Lamour) whose father owns a dud silver mine, a counterfeiter (Victor Moore) who looks like a snide old deacon, and a young fellow (Dick Powell) who can't decide just how honest is honest enough. Toothy Cass Daley, the pauper's Beatrice Lillie, may tickle groundlings. For others there is a very shrewd little slapfooted dance performed by Cy Landry as an Indian.

*There is no Joe in the show. A kid calls Pete that and explains: "In the Army Air Corps any fellow who is a right fellow is called Joe."

*Tracy insisted that the company wait for Johnson to get well, rather than reshoot with another actor.

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