The New Pictures

Paris Underground (United Artists) is based on the best seller about two women who helped smuggle some 200 British soldiers back to England. The book was authentic enough to have caused trouble for a number of real French undergrounders. The screen version will probably cause trouble to nobody except, perhaps, Constance Bennett. It-is her first venture as a producer.

This curtailed, modified account of the ladies' exploits (Miss Bennett plays a rather fast estranged wife) seems a little obsolescent by now and also not much like the real thing. But as a piece of melodramatic, patriotic entertainment it has its points. The producer's feminine touch can be seen in some intricately propped interiors and a very pretty sequence of a rain-drenched funeral procession. Gracie Fields' performance as the English spinster is near perfect. And Connie Bennett herself, who has lost nothing of her tough, wiry glamor with the years, gives fine style and energy to the international-smart-set aspects of her role. But she is unable to show deep emotion, physical suffering, or simple embarrassment.

The Producer. Miss Bennett is not easily embarrassed. "After all," as she explained, "I'm not getting any younger [she will be 40 this month] and this being glamorous can't go on forever. I don't see why I shouldn't get established as a producer."

It was neither quite as simple nor as easy as that. Constance Bennett is a veteran actress, highly experienced and highly opinionated. "All my life," she says, "I knew what was wrong with production, but this is the first time I could say, 'Wait a minute, let's fix it.' " Apparently she said this often (to everybody from scriptwriter to booking agent), regally and grimly (because she desperately wanted to succeed in her new role).

Director Gregory Ratoff played ineffectual hide-&-seek with Miss Bennett in the murkier shadows of the soundstage, but generally had to wind up the game with a shrug: "All right, dollink, ve do it your vay." Now & again anxious, imperious Producer Bennett asked fellow-producer Darryl F. Zanuck to look at the rushes; but it is reasonable to suspect that Mr. Zanuck did not take too much responsibility for the picture.

Yet Zanuck and other seasoned Hollywood geniuses have made worse movies. All in all, Paris Underground ought not to lose Miss Bennett any money. If it should, she is unlikely to starve. Currently she is

1) acting in Fox's Centennial Summer, 2) doing a daily 15-minute radio show for ABC, 3) helping run the New York firm of Constance Bennett Cosmetics Co. by long distance telephone, 4) designing a line of Constance Bennett Frocks which will be brought out this fall, 5) getting ready to start a daily syndicated newspaper column, 6) preparing for an overseas U.S.O. entertainment tour.

The House on 92nd Street (20th Century-Fox). When a personable, athletic young German-American named William Dietrich (William Eythe) graduated from a midwestern college in the late '303, he was offered an attractive proposition by the Nazis. How would he like to take a tour through Germany, with all expenses paid and perhaps study in a Hamburg university for a while? When Dietrich reported this offer to the FBI, he was told to accept it.

After a short course in a Nazi spy academy, Dietrich was sent back to the U.S. He soon found himself knee-deep in sleazy, shifty-eyed characters who were nibbling away at what this film calls the Government's Process 97 (construction of the atomic bomb).

How J. Edgar Hoover's G-men saved the day is the tense story of The House on 92nd Street. The desperate goings-on centering around an inconspicuous Manhattan brownstone building (run by talented Swedish Actress Signe Hasso) escape the routine of cloak-&-dagger melodrama by their realism.

When Producer Louis de Rochemont, a veteran of 22 years of newsreel and documentary photography (THE MARCH OF TIME), set out late last year to make a movie about his favorite subject, the FBI --which he fondly regards with all the hero worship of a small boy--he plunked his idea right on Director Hoover's desk. For their story, De Rochemont and Writer John Monks Jr. pored over scores of FBI case histories and pieced together a selection of the Bureau's better experiences.

Actors, technicians and equipment were toted hither & yon to get such actual backgrounds as the California Institute of Technology and the radio shack used by the Bureau to relay bogus information abroad. By shooting only 35 feet of film (less than half a minute) in the studio, able Director Henry Hathaway set some sort of record.

The De Rochemont-Hathaway-Monks approach to a purely fictional drama somehow suggests that the people on the screen are real and just happen to have been caught by a fortuitous camera. Actually, some of the film's G-men are the real McCoy. The picture serves up, as an added fillip, real FBI shots of pre-Pearl Harbor traffic in & out of the German Embassy.

For those who believe that naive Americans are no match for wily Europeans in the spy trade, and for those who just like their movies to move, The House is recommended entertainment.

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