The New Pictures

The Littlest Rebel (Twentieth Century-Fox). Cinema folk have lately been telling one another that Shirley Temple and Abraham Lincoln would make "an unbeatable combination." Definitely un beatable, the combination is well planted in this picture. When the Great Emancipator (Frank McGlynn Sr.) receives in his office Virgie Carey, "The Littlest Rebel of Them All," accompanied by her faithful black servitor, it is to plank the child on his desk, share an apple with her and hear from her the sad old story about the dashing Confederate scout (John Boles) who happens to be her widowed father.

As in The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel presents Shirley Temple in hoop skirts and high-button shoes, pairs her with Tap Dancer Bill Robinson. Still first-rate entertainment are the steps the two per form in a slave cabin, when they wish to distract a Yankee colonel, and again in a street when they seek to raise money to take them to see Abraham Lincoln. Miss Temple sings Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms and Polly Wolly Doodle. She also has a new foil in the person of a plump, solemn youngster named Edward McManus, who dances the minuet with her at a children's party, gravely pipes his apologies at being unable to bow low because his pantaloons are too tight.

Captain Blood (Warner) seems to be Warner's answer to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Mutiny on the Bounty. Whatever the literary merits of Rafael Sabatini's florid novels, they make excellent cinema fare when served with the crispness and gusto of Captain Blood.

The story begins in the reign of James II, one of England's best-hated kings. When a young doctor named Peter Blood (Errol Flynn) is found treating a wounded rebel, he is summarily convicted of treason, sent to Jamaica to be sold into slavery with a group of other James-haters. The island's No. 1 slave-buyer is Colonel Bishop (Lionel At will), a savage sugar plantation owner who runs his cumbrous mill with slave power. Peter Blood is promoted from the mill when he successfully treats the governor's gout, but he does not forget his wretched comrades. Meanwhile his insolence has earned the bitter hatred of Bishop and the affections of Bishop's niece Arabella (Olivia De Havilland).

When Spanish pirates cannonade and capture the town, Blood and his friends escape to the pirate craft, turn pirates themselves. With Britain at war with France and James II ousted at home by William of Orange, Blood gets a navy commission, captures a French man-of-war in a tremendous battle. That is enough for him to be appointed Jamaica's governor, to Arabella's delight and her uncle's extreme discomfiture.

Good shot: a sailor in the battle scene with his neck pinned between the ship's rail and a grappling hook.

A personable, mercurial Irishman, Errol Flynn plays a swashbuckling role without swashbuckling. Last June he married Lily Damita, whom he calls "Sweets." When he finished school in Belfast, where his father is a biology professor, Errol Flynn got bit parts on the London stage, later went to Tahiti, bought a boat, fished for pearls, prospected for gold in New Guinea. Back in London he got stage parts in Othello, Another Language, The Constant Nymph. Tall (6 ft. 2 in.), brawny (180 lb.), he boxed on England's 1928 Olympic team.

A Tale of Two Cities (Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer) was David Selznick's last product under his M-G-M contract (others: Dinner at Eight, Viva Villa, Anna Karenina, David Copper field). His difficult task was to deliver a picture that would be a modernized yet authentic version of a story known to every schoolboy, and at the same time one that would keep faith with the historic records of that bloody surge which frothed out of the gutters of Saint Antoine on July 14, 1789, to turn France upside down and change the history of the world.

His tale begins in London, years before the Revolution, with Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan) learning that her father has been delivered from political imprisonment, is being sheltered in the home of a French wine-seller named Defarge. In France coach-horses of the Marquis St. Evremonde trample a child in a tenement street. From these two incidents the Dickens' story builds and broadens until the sound track is eavesdropping on the pulse of a lost century--in France, "the bitter feet of an approaching people"; in England, sanctuary for young Charles Darnay (Donald Woods), nephew of St. Evremonde. Displeased with Darnay's politics, the Marquis has arranged to have a charge of treason brought against his nephew. Chief witness for the defense is Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman), a brilliant man, but a drunkard, degraded, hopeless, cynical. Saving Darnay from death is the beginning of Carton's regeneration.

Producer Selznick has made one important departure from all previous cinema adaptations of his material. Dickens conceived Darnay and Carton as doubles and in all cinematic presentations of the story, the two roles have been played by one actor. Colman stood out for playing one role, feeling that audience sympathy went to Carton anyway, and that a double was destructive to realism. Similar shrewdness has gone into casting the other roles. No one will soon forget the sultry, pathological hatred of aristocrats which vitalizes the performance of Mme Defarge (Blanche Yurka), bursting into crescendo in the picture's climax when, appealing to the Paris mob and the Revolutionary judges, she has Darnay condemned to the guillotine. Isabel Jewell, as the little seamstress, awaiting execution after Carton has substituted for Darnay in La Force Prison, seeks from Colman one word of explanation for her tragic life.

A Tale of Two Cities cost an even million dollars. Acknowledging in a formal "bibliography" on the screen its debt to Carlyle and other authorities on the period, it goes far beyond the limitations of the Dickens story. Director Jack Conway, whom Selznick says he chose because Conway is "a master of melodrama, and a big, good-natured, sentimental Irishman," has photographed the storming of the Bastille as if it happened yesterday afternoon. The whole picture constitutes a record of one of history's most melodramatic moments told in an idiom equal to its subject, from a skeleton designed by a novelist of genius. Like all real art, it achieves the general by relating the particular with an emotional intensity that never lets down from the first shot of a coach wheel being pulled through the mud of an English road to the last shot, in which the camera swings up from the dying Carton and the bloodthirsty crowd in the Place de la Revolution, up the shaft of the guillotine and still up, into the sunny sky of a new France.

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