The New Pictures

The African Queen (Horizon; United Artists) is the name of a leaky, 30-ft. steam launch that wheezes along a remote little river in German East Africa, delivering mail and supplies. When World War I begins to creep into the jungle, Skipper Humphrey Bogart noses his boat into a quiet backwater, intending to sit out the fighting with a case or two of Gordon's gin. But he takes on an unwelcome passenger, Katharine Hepburn, a prissy, "skinny old maid" who has other ideas. Determined to strike a blow for King, country and her dead missionary brother, Hepburn browbeats Bogart into running the guns of a German fort, shooting perilous rapids down to a lake patrolled by an enemy gunboat. Her object is to sink the gunboat with a homemade torpedo.

The movie is not great art, but it is great fun. Essentially it is one long, exciting, old-fashioned movie chase. Filmed in the Belgian Congo and Uganda by Director John Huston, it tells its adventure yarn in a blaze of Technicolor, fine wild scenery and action. While hippos gambol in the shallows and crocodiles gape evilly from mudbanks, Bogart and Hepburn fight each other, the elements and the Germans. They are shot at by natives, drenched by torrential downpours, devoured by mosquitoes and blood-sucking leeches, felled by malarial fevers. They triumph over heat, hardship and heartbreak only to end as prisoners of the Germans, with the hangman's noose about their necks. But Hollywood knows how a good movie chase must end: in one final, glorious and impossible explosion.

The script, by Huston and James Agee, is faithful to the spirit of C. S. Forester's 1935 novel. Bogart, cast as a Canadian instead of a Cockney, does the best acting of his career as the badgered rumpot who becomes a man and a lover against his will. Katharine Hepburn is excellent as the gaunt, freckled, fanatic spinster. Their contrasting personalities fill the film with good scenes, beginning with Bogart's tea-table agony as the indelicate rumbling of his stomach keeps interrupting Missionary Robert Morley's chitchat about dear old England.

Meet Danny Wilson (Universal-International) pictures the rise of a brash but likable young crooner to the special fame that only bobbysoxers can bestow. Apart from romantic and melodramatic trimmings that it borrows elsewhere, the story cribs so freely from the career and personality of Frank Sinatra that fans may expect Ava Gardner to pop up in the last reel. What sharpens the illusion is the playing of Crooner Danny Wilson by Crooner Sinatra himself.

It is not a very good movie, or even the best Sinatra has made, but it does give his talents the best cinematic showcase they have had. Cast as a knockabout who is quick of wit and whim, generous and irascible by turns, Frankie handles his role, and the script's quip-studded dialogue, with cocky, easy charm. By his tricky phrasing and showmanlike delivery, he gives a lift to a score full of old hits, e.g., You're a Sweetheart, When You're Smiling, Old Black Magic.

Meet Danny Wilson is pleasant when it gives Frankie the stage or when it sticks closest to his own story, as in a documentary-like scene of a teen-age audience swooning and squealing at Manhattan's Paramount Theater. But the pleasure drains away in a trite love story involving a nightclub singer (Shelley Winters), and a silly plot leading to a gun battle between Frankie and a gangster in an empty baseball park at night.

Shadow in the Sky (M-G-M), based on a New Yorker short story by Edward Newhouse, finds ex-Marine Ralph Meeker committed to a veterans' hospital because of his morbid tendency to hide under tables whenever it rains. When he is finally pronounced well enough to move in with his sister and brother-in-law (Nancy Davis and James Whitmore), they at first hesitate to bring him into close contact with their two children. But eventually they give in to the urgings of conscience embodied in Jean Hagen, a whimsical young woman who has met Meeker at hospital dances.

Having posed a fairly dramatic problem in human relationships, the movie promptly drops it for a lengthy debate over what Meeker should do with his $900 bankroll. Should he invest it in Whitmore's gas station? Or should he buy a boat and go junketing about the West Coast with Jean Hagen? The film never recovers from this odd digression, and Meeker's eventual cure is accomplished with Hollywood mirrors: in a tropical downpour, he saves his nephew's life, clears up his war neurosis in a brisk man-to-man chat with Whitmore, and, arm-in-arm with Jean, walks happily into the rainswept night.

A Girl in Every Port (RKO Radio] has Groucho Marx, but not much else, in its favor. Teamed with William Bendix, Groucho is a Navy veteran with a talent for swindling landlubbers. Starting with a race horse with bad legs, he launches a series of doubletalk deals that get him involved with gangsters, saboteurs, ringers and Marie Wilson. The plot, which limps as badly as Groucho's horse, fortunately has room for a number of familiar set pieces: Groucho confounding his Navy commander, Groucho playing a Kentucky colonel, Groucho leering at Marie Wilson. Director Chester Erskine, who also wrote the screenplay, subscribes to the theory that if the action is fast it must be funny. Groucho struggles heroically to prove him right, but doesn't quite make it.

Lady Possessed (Portland; Republic) resuscitates that familiar figure of movie melodrama: a living person haunted by the spirit of the dead.

The lady in question is an American girl (June Havoc) who moves into the stately English country home of James Mason, and is thereafter haunted by Mason's dead wife, Madelaine. By the third reel, June has dyed her blonde hair black to match Madelaine's, and is painting Siamese cats just as Madelaine once did. An irrational ending saves her from complete insanity, but does not save the film from looking foolish.

Lady Possessed, co-authored by Mason and his wife Pamela Kellino (who also appears in the picture) from her novel Del Palma, is equipped with all the standard ghost-story props: doors that open and close by themselves, a spooky seance, low-keyed lighting and eerie music. Outstanding novelty: Singer-Pianist Mason, usually typed as a glowering heavy, blithely crooning a sophisticated ditty which goes, in part:

It's you I love.

It isn't the Champs Elysees.

It isn't a tune by Bizet.

It's you I love.

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