The New Pictures

The Searching Wind (Hal Wallis--Paramount) is an angry film sermon against appeasement. Skillfully adapted from her own angry Broadway play by Lillian Hellman, the picture is an intelligent and frequently moving job. By Hollywood standards, it is highly courageous : it not only grapples with knotty political issues but it dares to address itself to grownups who can read without working their lips.

The basic plot is that old movie standby, the love triangle. In this case, the romancing does double duty as political allegory. In piling up her case against a wishy-washy U.S. foreign policy, Playwright Hellman has converted each of her characters into a sort of symbol.

Robert Young (the U.S. State Department) just happens to be standing on the sidelines as an American embassy employe when Mussolini makes his 1922 March on Rome. At the time, Diplomat Young is flirting with both Sylvia Sidney (the Militant Left) and Ann Richards (the International Set). An amiable, easygoing fellow, Robert doesn't instantly spot Mussolini as a menace to world peace. But Sylvia can see the big issues as quick as a flash. In fact, she is so shocked by Robert's hazy ideological thinking that she sorrowfully washes her hands of him. On the rebound, he marries Ann. From that day forward, the U.S. State Department is running with the Wrong Crowd straight toward World War II.

Robert struggles desperately and articulately against his love for Sylvia, fighting his own Leftist Conscience. Over a couple of decades, Robert and Sylvia keep running into each other all over seething Europe. They make love, part, meet again and swap Miss Hellman's acid-etched lines while Jews are being slugged on Berlin's streets (1928), while fascist bombs are crashing on Madrid (1936), while Paris diplomats are cooking up the Munich deal (1938).

Top acting honors go to a young newcomer named Douglas Dick. He gives a memorable, hackle-raising performance as the son who eventually loses a leg in a war his diplomat father did nothing to avert. But most of the Wind's virtues and practically all of its faults must be credited to Playwright Hellman, who generally manages to mix propaganda and playwriting pretty deftly. This time her plugging runs away with her plotting: the outsized portion of sermon occasionally preaches more convincingly than it plays.

Stormy Waters (MGM International), a French-made film with English titles, stars Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan, two talented French players who have long since attracted the admiring attention of Hollywood. Completed in 1940 just before the fall of France, the negative of this picture was spirited away to Bordeaux and kept hidden during the occupation.

The story, based on Roger Vercel's Goncourt Prize novel, Remorques (published in the U.S. as Salvage--TIME, Jan. n, 1937), is lacking in what the U.S. trade likes to call "big story values." Nothing much happens. Tugboat Captain Gabin, married for ten years to a nice, affectionate little blonde, suddenly finds that he's mad about Mile. Morgan. Except for a few convincing details, that's practically the whole plot.

Unlike many foreign imports. Stormy

Waters is beautifully lighted and photographed. Confirmed admirers of French filmmaking will also find it sparkling with the usual Gallic excellences: subtle underplaying, sharp character drawing, loving attention to significant detail, a shrewd understanding of the overtones to complex human relationships.

U.S. cinemaddicts who have sat through scores & scores of Hollywood yarns about the man, the wife and the Other Woman may be merely baffled. The actors in Stormy Waters, who behave in a very French but also very human fashion, act as though they had never heard of the standard movie triangle and had no idea that it must be played in a standard way.

Suspense (Monogram) has trouble deciding whether it is a murder thriller or an ice-skating extravaganza. It is chiefly notable as the first $1,000,000 production ever made by Monogram, a studio that normally specializes on low-budget quickies.

Over the ice and through the superheated plot, the picture's heaviest load is lugged by a svelte, sultry, English-born skater who bills herself professionally as Belita (real name: Belita Gladys Lyne Jepson-Turner). Playing the star of an elaborate rink called the Ice Gardens, and wife of the owner, Belita cuts as fancy a figure on a bedroom set as she does on ice. Her problem is to keep a chilly eye on Wolf Barry Sullivan, a criminally aggressive peanut hawker at the Gardens who covets both his boss's business investment and home life. The big skating spectacles, considerably more thrilling than the thrills-&-chills story, leave hardly any time for tidying up all the plot complications of passion and homicide.

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