The New Pictures

The Hairy Ape (United Artists), as Eugene O'Neill conceived him, was a one-man proletariat, a crude yet powerful symbol. A huge, half-demented ship's stoker, he was obsessed with the proud idea that he made the ship go, and ready to beat the brains out of anyone who attempted to gainsay him. He lost his mind when a slumming, crisply clad, attractive woman passenger, appalled (and excited) by his looks and language, recoiled and called him "the filthy beast!" At large ashore, he treated society much as an articulate King Kong might, and wound up in the killing embrace of a zoo gorilla. As played by Louis Wolheim on the stage, the Ape thrilled audiences and even critics out of their wits. As played by William Bendix on the screen, he goes through a great many of the same motions without ever getting anywhere or meaning very much.

Deprived of his bitter social implications, the Ape bums and blasts his way through a rudderless melodrama. Deprived of his ferocious eloquence, thanks doubtless to censorship, he talks like a tough guy who is trying not to shock his grandmother. Deprived of his tragic ending, he becomes, in retrospect, a not very convincing sailor ashore. Unfortunately, his screen creators have tried to compensate for these deficiencies by making him funny.

William Bendix is a likable and sincere actor, but his natural good temper shines fatally through his industrious soot-&-greasepaint toughness. Susan Hayward, as the girl who drives him crazy, is much tougher, too coarsely so for the size of the girl's penthouse or the height of her social standing, but she is more convincing. She is, in fact, Hollywood's ablest bitch-player.

Two Girls and a Sailor (M-G-M). The girls are sister nightclub singers named Patsy and Jean Deyo. Noble Patsy (June Allyson) is as reliable as the polestar; spoiled Jean (Gloria De Haven) is as unreliable as a polecat. The sailor (Van Johnson) gives his name as plain John Brown, so it comes as no surprise to learn that he is really John Dyckman Brown III, a democratic multimillionaire. Before the sisters learn his secret he spends a good deal of his fortune sending orchids (signed "Somebody") to flirtatious Jean, much to Patsy's pain.

Brown spends a good deal more of his money (again as "Somebody") turning a theatrical warehouse into a super-canteen where the Deyo girls, Harry James, Xavier Cugat, Lena Home, Gracie Allen and Jimmy Durante entertain soldiers, sailors and cinemaddicts. In the end, Jean falls in love with a Texas onion-rancher in sergeant's uniform, and the way is clear for the girl with the million-dollar conscience to embrace the million-dollar blue-jacket.

If this sort of story were performed for its own sake, it would play only to ushers and to those who scrape chicle from the undersides of theater seats. Played to music and other anesthetics, the plot is often hardly noticeable. Both Deyo sisters are nice to look at, and Gracie Allen obliges uproariously with her One Finger Piano Concerto.

Jimmy Durante, having no logical reason to be on hand except to be himself, is just that and accordingly walks away with the show. As a onetime vaudeville headliner reduced to the want-ad columns, a sort of daftly faithful hound for the heroines, this wonderful clown does little that is new except find his long-lost son, in the picture's funniest shot. But when, leering fiercely, he sings Inka Dinka Doo, or when, in hyper-Dostoevskian mental conflict, he confides Did You Ever Have the Feelin' That You Wanted to Go, he gives pleasure of an intensity roughly equivalent to saturation bombing. Jimmy Durante remains living proof that demonic energy can be used for something better than breaking civilizations.

Roger Touhy, Gangster (20th Century-Fox) is a double-helping of nostalgia for cinemaddicts who remember some of the most exciting U.S. movies ever made, such gangster films as Underworld, Drag Net, Public Enemy, Little Caesar. Here, as in the old days, sedans careen fiercely, eyes go deadly at the business-ends of tommyguns, actors circle each other tensely, growling like enraged tom cats, and the iron, melancholic beauty of U.S. city streets and interiors is appreciated as it seldom is in gentler films. Yet taken all in all, Touhy isn't really a very good show.

The story of Touhy & Co. (Preston Foster, Victor McLaglen et al.) follows, fairly closely, the story of the original "Terrible" Touhy's last days at large. There are exciting bits in the film, and sharp ones, the cynically mumbled administration of an oath in court; the horrible kicking around of a lush (Horace MacMahon); the melodramatically cautious entrance of G-men into a hideout which turns out to be empty; the keenly amusing use of a complacent newsreel in which Illinois' Governor Green takes "personal charge" of the search for Touhy; and cold, excellent shots of Stateville inmates listless against its massive prison buildings.

But the great gangster films were as immediate to their day as that day's newspapers. For all its harshness, this one, like the events it tells of, seems to happen years after its proper time.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Attack! The Battle of New Britain (TIME, June 12).

Underground Report (MARCH OF TIME, including much captured German film; TIME, June 5).

Gaslight (Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer; TIME, May 22).

The Hitler Gang (Robert Watson, Victor Varconi, Luis Van Rooten, Martin Kosleck; TIME, May 8).

The Adventures of Mark Twain (Fredric March, Alexis Smith; TIME, May 8).

Going My Way (Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald; TIME, May 1).

The Memphis Belle (TIME, April 17).

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

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

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