The New Pictures

Candlelight in Algeria (British Lion 20th Century-Fox) illuminates a dark corner of the invasion of North Africa. Its heroine (Carla Lehmann), a Kansas-born sculptress, hides a fugitive Englishman (James Mason) from the local Nazi chief (Walter Rilla). Later she snitches a small camera from the lair of a collaborationist nightclub singer (Enid Stamp-Taylor). A lot of people are interested in this camera, because it contains film which shows the location of the seaside house in which General Mark Clark and his colleagues are soon to rehearse signals for the invasion. Dapper Nazi Rilla and his henchmen energetically hound its bearers through the deluxe hotels and low dives of Algiers, take part in a brisk auto-chase which winds up at the very time & place of General Clark's rendezvous.

Fleet, flexible second-grade melodrama, handled with habitual British know-how, Candlelight is further enjoyable for its three leading performances. Canadian Carla Lehmann, with her prairie voice, is about twice as American as the average U.S. screen heroine. James Mason, an English matinee idol new to U.S. cinemaddicts, suggests a welterweight Clark Gable. Walter Rilla, once popular on the German stage and screen, is perhaps the most satisfying portrayer of suave continental menace since the late Conrad Veidt.

Summer Storm (United Artists) drives that shapely moujik, Linda Darnell, into a Russian garden house for shelter, and into the steaming presence of a dissolute Raymond Lovell.

Russian count, Edward Everett Horton, and a no-less-dissolute Russian judge, George Sanders. Their breathing becomes heavy. They are lost men.

A ruthless, passionate young woman, out strictly for the highest bidder, she keeps them on her leash even after she marries doting, pathetic Peasant Hugo Haas. First she destroys Judge Sanders' attempt to settle down with a wife (sugary, upper-class Anna Lee). Then she parades before the count in his dead wife's wedding dress. At length, on a shooting party (the film is made from Chekhov's story The Shooting Party), she is mysteriously knifed to death. Her husband takes the rap. The Bolshevik revolution overtakes her guilty lover before justice does.

Stacked against, the run of U.S. films, Summer Storm is well above the ordinary. Stacked against the kind of European film it is trying to be, it is as distractingly uneven as a ride in a flat-wheeled streetcar. There are moments of remarkable sensitiveness to season, landscape, and the part they can play in creating erotic and moral atmospheres. There are even moments when handsome Linda Darnell embodies the natural force she is portraying. And Edward Everett Horton somehow manages to suggest that a Tsarist rake would look and act like Edward Everett Horton. But too much of Scripter-Director Douglas Sirk's effort is polysyllabic, "cultered" and Little Theaterish.

Once Upon a Time (Columbia) a little boy named Stinky found a caterpillar named Curley, a threadbare theatrical agent found them both, and things began to happen fast. Curley was not just a worm; he could do a turn. Whenever Stinky munched Yes, Sir, That's My Baby on his mouth organ, Curley got up on his points and danced. The agent soon made his fame global. He was the toast of feature writers, the darling of lepidopterists. He was photographed embracing Mayor LaGuardia's finger, strolling up a model's leg. LIFE ran him on its cover, with the simple caption Curley. Bill Robinson introduced the Curley Capers. Grover Whalen bid for his services as a morris dancer at the New York World's Fair.

When scientists insisted that Curley was theirs to dissect. Curley's manager refused to part with him. Preachers and pundits made an issue of it--rugged individualism v. regimentation. Then one day Curley disappeared. His return was something of a miracle.

That was in 1940, and the story (by Lucille Fletcher Herrmann and Norman Corwin), breezing over CBS in half-an-hour flat, was one of the best and most popular radio plays of the year.

This screen reincarnation of Curley's story is not the best picture of 1944, but it is bland and sometimes amusing fantasy.

Stinky, on the screen, becomes Pinky (Ted Donaldson), a plump little boy who, for all his talents, looks too much like a child actor. Curley does all his workouts in a shoe box, and though dozens of his screen colleagues watch him constantly, the tantalized audience never gets a gander. The agent (Cary Grant) is no pathetic shoe-stringer. He is a dapper Broadway impresario in danger of losing his theater. When he loses it, Cary is solaced by meeting Pinky's lush sister (Janet Blair). His slit-pussed sidekick (James Gleason), is perhaps the best member of the cast.

Much of the radio play's rapid improvisation and kidding is lost on the screen, but enough is left to carry the story. The fable itself, as scripted by Lewis Meltzer and Oscar Saul, is given new gentleness, meaning, sadness--the journalists are tougher, the scientists more cruel and smug. The use of Art Baker to play bleating Gabriel Heatter is a master stroke. But Alexander Hall's direction, less nimble than in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, fails to make these ingredients do more than crawl about. Almost never do they get up on their good points and dance.

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