The New Pictures

Mr. Emmanuel (Two Cities-United Artists) tells the story of a sort of Jewish Mr. Chips, so creakily gallant and suicidally innocent an old gentleman that he goes from England to Germany in 1938 to look for the mother of a distraught Jewish refugee boy. He finds security, of an uneasy sort, in a seedy-bourgeois Jewish pension. But he soon learns that in Hitler's Berlin it is as much as your life is worth to ask for somebody's address, and that if you are a Jew, your British citizenship is worth only a laugh. When he takes his little problem to the police, he is arrested under suspicion of involvement in the assassination of a Nazi official.

The incredible guilelessness of Isaac Emmanuel's errand, and his courage and dignity before his brutal judge and torturers, serve all the more to convince the Gestapo that he has a great deal to cover up. After prison scenes which recall those of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the old man is released, thanks to an Anglo-Jewish cabaret star and a Nazi bigshot (Walter Rilla) who is infatuated with her. When at length old Isaac does find the boy's mother, she has married a Nazi and has so wholly betrayed all that was ever good about her that, on his return to England, he thinks it best to tell the child she is dead.

Filmed in London, this screen version of Louis Golding's novel (TIME, July 24, 1939) is in some respects as hammily insistent on wringing the last drop of emotion out of the audience as East Lynne or The Old Curiosity Shop. But since history has made its horrors real, and the story is intelligently produced and extremely well played, it is one of the most affecting of anti-Fascist screen melodramas. Stage Veteran Felix Aylmer turns in such a mellow performance as the fragile, intrepid old man that it is easy to forgive him for visibly licking his chops over the role. Norway-born Greta Gynt, as the cabaret singer, is so crashingly carnal in her first U.S. appearance that Hollywood seems, for her, an inevitable end.

Guest in the House (Hunt Stromberg-United Artists) is the psychological complement of another good Broadway-derived melodrama, Tomorrow the World (TIME, Jan. 15), in which a little boy from Hitler's Germany tries to tear an American household apart. The heroine of Guest in the House is quite unpolitical, but she is a spiritual Nazi -- a power-mad, not unfamiliar feminine type for whom psychiatrists could supply accurate names.

The minute whey-faced, invalid Evelyn Heath (Anne Baxter) enters the Proctor home and makes a tender request that nobody move and disturb this perfect picture for just a moment, any perceptive member of the family would have clapped on his hat and sprinted for help. But the Proctors, being merely nice, well-meaning people, are singularly unperceptive.

Dr. Dan Proctor (Scott McKay) is daft in love with his neurotic, flutter-hearted patient, and has brought her to his family's home to calm her down for marriage. His-brother Douglas (Ralph Bellamy), a gay, bottom-slapping commercial artist, has a vaguely kind idea he can help straighten her out; she promptly determines to devour his soul. Douglas' wife Ann (Ruth Warrick), suspecting nothing, is all solicitude and sympathy; their little girl Lee (Connie Laird) is so infatuated that she begins to ape Evelyn's haloed mannerisms. Sick-minded Evelyn, using always the silkiest of deceptions, needs only a few weeks to set all the members of the household against each other: servants, artist's-model, wife & child fly apart like a fragmentation bomb, leaving her in complete possession of the artist.

When at last Aunt Martha (Aline MacMahon) fixes everything up by torturing a key nerve of Evelyn's psychosis--a terror of birds--and driving her stark mad, the effect is heavily overmelodramatic. Up to then, Guest in the House is a sharp and scary if never definitive study of the tyranny of weakness, and of the sinister conflicts and confusions which it can inspire among the relatively strong.

Brought to Action (U. S. Navy-War Activities Committee), is a beautifully edited, terse (21-min.), finely lucid record and explanation of the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea. Certain of its shots of doomed and dying enemy ships, of enemy planes coming apart in midflight, give a clearer realization that human life is involved in them than anything in the greater naval record Fighting Lady (TIME, Jan. 22).

By the use of captured Japanese film, moreover, this little picture gives unusually telling emphasis to the fact that it takes two to make a quarrel. (The Japanese film, incidentally, shows the strong ultraromantic influence of Nazi documentaries, which try by melodramatic low-angling and gauze-and-halo effects to turn human beings into creatures out of a legend.) The film is probably the clearest exposition of the rhythm and strategy of a battle that has yet been put on a screen for laymen. Its deeply moving close: an airman, dead in his shattered plane, is given sea burial in it.

CURRENT & CHOICE

The Fighting Lady (U.S. Navy; TIME, Jan. 22).

I'll Be Seeing You (Joseph Gotten, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple; TIME, Jan. 22).

The Keys of the Kingdom (Gregory Peck, Edmund Gwenn, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Rosa Stradner; TIME, Jan. 1).

The Unknown Battle (MARCH OF TIME; TIME, Jan. 1).

National Velvet (Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Anne Revere; TIME, Dec. 25).

Winged Victory (Corporal Don Taylor, Sergeant Mark Daniels, Sergeant Edmond O'Brien, Private Lon McCallister, Jane Ball; TIME, Dec. 25).

Meet Me in St. Louis (Margaret O'Brien, Judy Garland; TIME, Nov. 27).

None But the Lonely Heart (Gary Grant, Ethel Barrymore; TIME, Nov. 20).

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