The New Pictures

Kidnapped (Twentieth Century-Fox). In telling this story. Robert Louis Stevenson indulged in a few frank errors. But the only far-reaching one was his foreword, saying ''how little I am touched by the desire of accuracy." For from this offered inch Hollywood was bound to make an ell. The past cinema season has been pretty rough on Stevenson--adding a blonde Kozatsky dancer to the Soviet's Treasure Island (TIME, Jan. 31), flaunting an unimagined Hollywood ingenue in a Technicolored sarong in Ebb Tide (TIME, Nov. 29)--but in Kidnapped, R. L. S. takes the count. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck. the better to display a fine figure of a lass named Arleen Whelan, has shifted many of the novel's best scenes to strange and shadowy positions, has relegated to the attic the memorable ball-and-cutlass siege of the Brig Covenant's roundhouse, has made storied Patriot Alan Breck (Warner Baxter) play nursemaid.

Until Director H. Bruce Humberstone discovered her and took her to Producer Zanuck for a screen test, green-eyed, red-haired Arleen Whelan was a Hollywood manicurist. A lithe, natural lass with Celtic charm and an unaccountable suggestion of a double chin, she was soon rumored to be David Selznick's choice for Scarlett O'Hara. But Zanuck had already signed her. In Kidnapped her voice lacks depth, except when she is singing a Scottish ballad with Maxine Sullivan flavor. She acts as if she were not quite at home in Scotland or Hollywood.

As the solemn Whig lad, David Balfour of Shaws, 14-year-old Freddie Bartholomew may be a shade on the jackanapes side for those who want their Stevenson straight, but he fits this feckless Fox version. Gibbous nose aloft and in fine priggish voice, Master Freddie imparts phonetic reality to an age when Britishers wrote s's that looked like f's.

Epochal scene: Freddie, feeling his oats, winning a tussle with crabby old Uncle Ebenezer, tossing off a mug of small beer and strutting about with today-I-am-a-man cocksureness.

Three Comrades (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Like many another able writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald has gone to Hollywood. In this script, with Edward E. Paramore, he tried to adapt Erich Maria Remarque's novel into a corrosive arraignment of Nazi Germany. They wrote a scene in which a poor Jew proclaimed his love for Germany, another in which a rich Jew refrained from cheating three young gentiles, a scene in which famed books, including Remarque's, were burned by Nazis. Hays office censorship left none of these scenes in the finished picture. Much political content is removed by a camera shot of a blowing newspaper dated October 1920, still more by removal of all definite party labels. What is left is a love story, beautifully told and consummately acted, but so drenched in hopelessness and heavy with the aroma of death, of wasted youth in a world of foggy shapes and nameless menaces, that its beauty and strength are often clouded and betrayed.

Three Comrades shows how three men can marry a girl at the same time without jealousy or any loss of the unbreakable ties binding them together. Erich (Robert Taylor) is the only one who goes to bed with Patricia (Margaret Sullavan). but his comrades, who need something to live for, marry her in spirit. Otto (Franchot Tone), most practical of the three, accepts the world as he finds it. Gottfried (Robert Young) wants to change it. He belongs to a political society, and when he is shot by a gunman of no particular party stripe, Otto avenges him with a bullet from his army Luger. When Patricia, whom all three loved so well and worked so hard for, dies of tuberculosis, Otto and Erich must depend on ghosts for comradeship.

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