The New Pictures

Girl No. 217 (Artkino), after a nine-day ride in a sealed, packed boxcar, is lined up with other Russian civilians in a German railway depot. German civilians stroll along the line, lifting a Russian chin now & again with an umbrella handle, for closer scrutiny. The Germans are shopping for slaves. Girl 217 (Elena Kuzmina) goes to a pudgy, henbrained grocer's wife and shares a room with another Russian slave, who is trying, in his scant spare time, to keep up his scientific work.

The grocer and his family are not an edifying crew. The grocer (played with enthusiastic hatred by Character Actor Vladimir Vladislavsky), is hoarding all the money which his former employer, a Jew, left in his safekeeping. By law, he should have turned over half of it to the Reich. The grocer's daughter and her crippled fiance use this knowledge to blackmail him into setting up the fiance to a store of his own. The grocer's son, when he comes home on leave from the Russian front, is half insane with contempt for his family; and his pathological comrade Kurt, after torturing in turn the cripple and the slave girl, bullies the money out of the old man.

The German family is repeatedly referred to by the Soviet makers of this film as an average German family. Their sordidness and guilt, by strong inference, illustrates the sordidness and guilt of all Germans. Far from unauthentic, they are passionately ferocious caricatures of the globally ubiquitous petty bourgeois at his worst--a worst already recorded by such masters as Flaubert. Their sordid motives and moral density probably reached an all-time low in the world Adolf Hitler gave them to live in--a world which both encouraged and required the type. In spite of his zeal, Author-Director Mikhail Romm has not made an adequate image of the German people. But he has made a more than adequately exciting movie--powerfully acted, and conceived and directed with considerable intelligence.

First Yank Into Tokyo (RKO-Radio) might well be subtitled First Atomic Bomb Thriller Out of Hollywood. It was originally a stock B potboiler about a vague "superbomb," just ready to be picked off the RKO assembly line when news of the atomic bomb was announced. By snipping in a quick scene in a Washington office and pasting on the newsreel clip of the first practice explosion in New Mexico, RKO beats everyone else to the neighborhood houses.

The First Yank is Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal), an Army pilot who was raised in Japan and speaks the language without a trace of an accent. He is therefore drafted by Washington to rescue an American scientist (Marc Cramer) from a Jap prison camp. The captive scientist appears to be the only man who knows the whole formula for completing the atom bomb. The Major forthwith undergoes some heavy-handed plastic surgery to give him buck teeth, slant eyes and a puffy face which make him look less like a Jap than like a man with a chronic hangover. In the tick of a time fuse he is being smuggled into Japan by the Korean underground as Sergeant Tomo Takashima, a returning war hero. He gets a job in a prison hospital, where he finds his nuclear scientist. By a streak of dazzling luck he also finds that the hospital's head nurse is his old girl, Abby (Barbara Hale), an

Army nurse who was captured on Bataan.

From this point on, it is high-octane cops & robbers, ending with a slam-bang fist fight and a breakneck chase as the Major, Abby and the scientist dash for the water's edge and a waiting British submarine. In a simple-minded way, it is good, fast fun.

Duffy's Tavern (Paramount) brings to the screen radio's Ed Gardner & friends -- and bolsters them with a star-spangled variety show.

Archie (Ed Gardner), the Duffy bar tender, is feeding and boozing 14 unemployed exservicemen in the back room, strictly on his frayed cuff. Their former employer, O'Malley (Victor Moore), is clumsily trying to connive the shellac and the funds to reopen his record factory.

What with one misunderstanding and an other, both Archie and O'Malley face a thorough legal shellacking. They are saved when practically all the Paramount players who could be rounded up stage a benefit show. The acts, stronger on noise than on finesse, reach some sort of climax in Cass Daley's confident rendition of You Can't Blame a Gal for Tryin'. Best acts: Betty Hutton singing The Hard Way in self-explanation to a psychoanalyst; Eddie Bracken suffering superbly as a double in a horse opera; Robert Benchley showing Bing Crosby's four young sons an illustrated biography of their father.

There is a friendly, disreputable air about much that goes on in Duffy's Tavern. Victor Moore, in handling everything from a glass of brandy to a paintbrush, is a virtuoso of the fumble. Ed Gardner, who rather suggests a ravaged Randolph Scott, is as agreeable to see as he is to hear. His specialty is straight verbal misfires such as "satisfied public accountant," his proud claim to sexual "maggotism" and his wistful reference to his Harvard days ("good old Eli"). But he also delivers a permanent description of a moneybag: "If he can't take it with him I guarantee it he don't go."

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