The New Pictures

Blood on the Sun (United Artists], a story about a Hoover-era American editor who learned of Baron Tanaka's plan for world conquest and tried to get the document out of Japan, is mainly apocryphal. But as melodrama it is as hard, tidy and enjoyable as the work of its star James Cagney, the dean of the sort of movie in which action and good sense collaborate instead of colliding.

Editor Cagney, aroused by the brutal murders of his good friends Reporter Wallace Ford & wife (Rosemary De Camp), who first try to get the plan out of the country, beards such Black Dragons as Baron Tanaka (John Emery) and Colonel Tojo (Robert Armstrong) in their ultra-ceremonious dens. He gets framed by the Japanese police; makes the romantic acquaintance of a half-Chinese beauty (Sylvia Sidney) whose access to high places stirs his suspicions; unmasks the crookery of a fellow-journalist (Rhys Williams); helps drive Tanaka to harakiri. For comic relief he makes a monkey, again & again, out of his feckless shadower (Leonard Strong). He uses judo, to thrilling and protracted effect, to chop down huge, shaven-pated Heavy Jack Halloran. Finally, in front of the U.S. Embassy one night, he confronts what looks like the entire secret police force of Japan. His tag line, spat at an oleaginous police chief (Marvin Mueller) who has had the insolence to try to appeal to him as a Christian: "Yes; forgive your enemies. But first--get even!"

In its stretches of muted menace and its well-designed explosions of violence, Blood on the Sun has much of the clean, sharp-nerved charm which used to distinguish the adventure romances of the late great Douglas Fairbanks Sr. A shade less inspired than Fairbanks as an athlete, Cagney is an even better actor. He cannot even put a telephone receiver back on its hook without giving the action special spark and life. Moreover, liberal Actor-Producer Cagney is a man of sense and good will. He takes care, even in the midst of this angry bit of patriotism, to show that there are honorable and anti-militaristic Japanese as well as the sort who took the nation over--and that there have been treacherous Americans. As notably, he develops serious intentions towards a Eurasian girl, coolly counters her it-can-never-be demurrers with: "That's an insult to the Irish."

Those Endearing Young Charms (RKO-Radio) confronts Robert Young, an Air Forces wolf on furlough in New York, with Laraine Day, an impressionable girl. She lives with a mother (Ann Harding) whose memories of her own blighted romance make her at first fear for her daughter, then urge her to go ahead and take her chances. Kicked around rather heartlessly among these three is Bill Williams, an unlucky lump of puppy love. During most of the film Mr. Young is about as systematically caddish as a man can well be and yet rate stellar billing; he even pretends to be torn away by sudden orders, purely for the purpose of setting a fire under the balky heroine. But in the long run, predictably, he finds that this amatory war differs from all the others, and that he has at last met his match.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this story doesn't make much of a movie. It is not remarkably interesting this time. Yet it is more mature, real and touching by a good deal than the story's basic stencil might lead you to expect. Jerome Chodorov's dialogue is sometimes merely slick but often, for all its slickness, it bears a cousinly relation to the talk of real people. Robert Young may seem too pleasant a sort to carry much weight as a gay seducer, until you remember how markedly pleasant some of them are. Miss Day gets across enough of the young woman's sufferings, palpitations and efforts at self-defense to make even her beauty an afterthought, if a happy one.

Miss Harding's role is superfluous in any strict story sense, but it is the first in a long time that has given her talents any room to move around in, and she makes the most of it. Except in one good, ugly scene with Young, the picture goes soft and cute whenever promising Newcomer Bill Williams appears. But that seems to be less the actor's mistake than that of Director Lewis (The Uninvited) Allen, who makes very few others in this picture.

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