The New Pictures

Along Came Jones (International-RKO Radio), Gary Cooper's first effort as a producer, is also his first Western since The Westerner (1940). The result turns out to be something like watching a grown man roll a hoop. Dyed-in-the-wool Cooper fans, and Western fans, may find the whole thing a little painful. But people who take neither Cooper nor Westerns seriously may be agreeably entertained.

The pi'cture has all the makings of the genuine article: a pretty, sharpshooting cowgirl (Loretta Young), a vicious bandit (Dan Duryea), a stagecoach holdup, posses, fast horses, plenty of shooting, a singing cowboy hero known as Melody Jones (Cooper). He doesn't sing much, and he doesn't so much sing as mumble shyly, but it is the first time in his 51 pictures that he has sung at all, and it's a good song (Old Joe Clark). But the audience knows something is amiss the first time Gary draws his shooting iron--and almost maims himself. Soon he is firing gags from both hips. As a feckless, peace-loving but irritatable cowboy, he gets into a series of half-serious, half-hilarious scrapes, climaxed by a fierce exchange of boots at ten paces with the desperate bandit.

Along Came Jones is favored with some unusually good photography, though occasionally arty, it has snatches of ramshackle realism. The picture also had an unusually able scenarist, Funnyman Nunnally Johnson, who never hesitates to throw away a tense scene when he can think of a gag. Sample: finding a murdered body on his hands, Melody Jones asks what his partner means by the phrase corpus delicti. Answer: "It means if they got a corpus, you're delict."

Unfortunately, the buildups are sometimes too good. The film might be more successful as comedy if it were less painstakingly skillful in creating moments of suspense. As it is, the production is too tricky to be effective either as farce or melodrama; its sudden changes of mood often convey a feeling that the picture is kidding not itself but the audience.

Nob Hill (20th Century-Fox) is a document of social insignificance as foggy and expensively furnished as the austere eminence for which it is named. A sentimental saga of class war in the early IQOOS, its only sunlit moments occur when the plot and the famed habitat of San Francisco's 400 are abandoned and the film goes slumming in the gaslit environs of the Barbary Coast, a region by now as familiar to most cinemaddicts as their own backyards.

Time passes happily enough in the gilt and plush saloon of silky-smooth, steel-fisted, honest Tony the Angel (George Raft). His devoted, carrot-topped singer Sally (Vivian Blaine) warbles her way through a series of top-notch new musical numbers, sweetened with the soft-shoe rhythms and barbershop harmonies of the period. But even such authentic musical backdrops as Moonlight Bay and Shine On, Harvest Moon, tinkled on pianolas or wheezed through the gaping morning-glory horns of pristine phonographs, are powerless to give conviction or pathos to the story of loyal Sally's heartbreak or Angel Raft's dalliance with the snobbish Nob Hill hussy, Harriet Carruthers (Joan Ben--nett).

Back to Bataan (RKO Radio), produced with Army & Navy cooperation, is a straightforward, unsentimental, stirring tribute to the Philippine guerrillas who kept on fighting Japs after the American surrender. The story, which begins with the U.S. Army's defeat on Bataan and ends with its victorious return, is based on actual characters and events. Between defeat and victory the guerrillas, under the command of a U.S. Army colonel (John Wayne), blow up oil fields, steal enemy supplies and finally, on Dday, dynamite a bridge, blockade a road and hold off the Japs until the Army arrives,

In a warm portrayal of the Filipinos, the picture lends lustre to their loyalty by making no secret of their frequent misgivings. But convincing as the story is, the picture is at its best in the faked but grimly realistic battle scenes. In one sequence, outnumbered U.S. and Philippine defenders mow down Japs by the hundred as they try to cross a barbed-wire fence. Best shot: a body, which turns out to be Colonel Wayne, spun, twisted and tossed several feet in the air by the concussion of an exploding shell.

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