The New Pictures

Whistling in Brooklyn (M.G.M.). Whistle in Brooklyn, and sooner or later a Dodger will turn up. They all turn up toward the climax of this melocomic fracas, in which Red Skelton clowns around in House-of-David-style false whiskers in order to warn a police inspector that the trusted friend sitting next him at a ball game is a homicidal maniac. The story is strenuously pasted together for laughs, but some of its comic assault & battery hits the funnybone, while Red Skelton, his idiotic beard and imbecilic lack of interest in the game he is supposed to pitch, sometimes conflict humorously with the maniacal seriousness of Ebbets Field baseball.

There is also a prolonged slapstick struggle with murderers aboard an old ship. And at one nightmarish juncture M.G.M.'s scripters manage to hang Skelton, Rags Ragland, Ann Rutherford and Jean Rogers, in a gently swinging human chain, from the top of an elevator shaft. High comic moment: Red Skelton, as anchor-man for this gibbering pendulum, decides to rest his hands by letting go and standing on the shoulders of Rags Ragland, who is desperately clinging to Skelton's ankles.

The Memphis Belle (U.S. Eighth Air Force-Paramount) is the name of a Flying Fortress. This 45-minute picture reports the Belle's 25th mission over Germany, which retired her crew to the U.S. The film is chiefly the work of Lieut. Colonel William Wyler, whose last film as a civilian was Mrs. Miniver, a shrewd but somewhat plushy war poster. There is no plush about Memphis Belle. It is one of the few genuinely exciting U.S. documentaries.

All of the combat shots in Memphis Belle were made on the spot. Some other shots of the crew and their comrades were made at leisure, but from start to finish the film never puts on the deadening look of reenactment. The hope and fear on the faces of the flyers when they get their orders to bomb Wilhelmshaven are real hope and fear. The hope and anxiety of the ground crew, waiting through a long, pastoral afternoon for the plane's return are just as real. The joy of both groups when, late and limping, the Belle gets back loses none of its life-&-death resonance because it irresistibly suggests schoolboys and athletes when a victorious team comes home.

The Belle's mission takes its crew among prodigious scenes which have seldom been so well recorded. Even the take-off into the mild sunlight has grandeur. As the swift ground shrivels into easy, floating legibility, cinemaddicts feel that sudden magical suction in the midriff which the actual experience brings. Climax of this effect: a magnificent close-up of the landing gear as it retracts, flattening like the feet of a bird in flight, and disclosing the countryside. Technicolor comes fully into its own when the Belle and the planes of her formation climb steadily over the North Sea, striating the sky with vapor trails, and when (over Germany) the flak begins to pop its thick corn. Shots which are merely powerful in black-&-white become overpoweringly real and immediate in Technicolor. To the layman the actual bombing, for all its excitement, is just an uncommunicative, tremendous tower of smudge. And the trip home, through fierce air fighting, lacks the fine coherent tension which make the first two-thirds of Memphis Belle a remarkable film.

Another documentary showing, last fortnight, was Tunisian Victory, the U.S. and British Governments' long-awaited sequel to Desert Victory (TIME, April 12, 1943). Tunisian Victory is worth seeing if only for a few minutes aboard the two lordliest convoys in history (they carried the British and Americans to Africa). There are some eye-shattering shots of combat, too. The film was made with care and skill, but the intricate military story is told too doggedly, with too much commentary. A general high-surface of tact and politeness reduces the film's forces as a record of truth. Most unfortunate touch is the finale between the off-screen voices of a British and a U.S. soldier philosophizing vaguely about the postwar world, signing off with a glad, excruciating: "Wot a job! Bringin' back the smiles to kids' faces!"

Uncertain Glory (Warner) indulges Warner Bros.' pet delusion that Errol Flynn may play the hero, but that he is even more appealing as a heel. This time Cinemactor Flynn is an Occupied-French murderer who is about to be guillotined when some opportune British bombs help him to escape. A dowdy Parisian plain-clothes man (Paul Lukas) recaptures him in a village where saboteurs have just blown up a bridge and the Gestapo is about to shoot 100 hostages in reprisal. Result: one of those ethical problems that bedevil Warner Bros.' pictures: Should the detective turn over his prisoner to the Vichy police or let Cinemactor Flynn impersonate the saboteur and thus free the hostages from the Gestapo? The problem is mildly complicated by Murderer Flynn's dalliance with a small-town girl (Jean Sullivan). At last Flynn and Lukas decide that they are Frenchmen even more than murderer and plain-clothes man. The ethical problem is solved and the picture ended in what readers of A Tale of Two Cities will recognize as a brisk burst of Sydney Carton.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Cover Girl (Rita Hayworth, Gene Kelly; TIME, April 10).

With the Marines at Tarawa (TIME, March 20).

Up In Arms (Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore; TIME, March 13).

The Purple Heart (Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Sam Levene, John Craven; TIME, March 6).

Lady in the Dark (Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Jon Hall; TIME, Feb. 21).

Miracle of Morgan's Creek (William Demarest, Betty Hutton, Eddie Bracken, Diana Lynn; TIME, Feb. 14).

Song of Bernadette (Jennifer Jones, Gladys Cooper, Charles Bickford; TIME, Feb. 7).

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