The New Pictures

Green Hell (Universal) has nothing but its title in common with Author Julian Duguid's brutally vivid account of physical torments in the Bolivian jungles. The picture dramatizes the dangers run by a group of treasure seekers trapped in a fetid South American jungle between a tribe of head-hunting Indians and Joan Bennett.

"It's awe-inspiring," exclaims Gold Digger Douglas Fairbanks Jr. when they first sight an Inca ruin, "like the great ruins at Ankor." Undeniably awe-inspiring, the ruins look more like the trylon at the New York World's Fair with the top knocked off. Soon the diggers are blowing the ruins to bits. They have the hidden treasures neatly crated in their jungle hideaway by the time Joan Bennett arrives in quest of her explorer husband.

From then on, the picture suggests a graph of jungle jitters. Cinemactress Bennett provides the fatal virus. Young Douglas Fairbanks runs up the highest curve. To make matters hotter, the jungle (which covered 45,000 square feet of a Universal lot) teems with hostile Indians. To make doubly sure that it is all right for Douglas Fairbanks to go off with Joan Bennett, the Indians kill her husband and it turns out that he was a bigamist.

Typical line: "How mysterious the jungle is at night."

Raffles (United Artists). Ernest William Hornung did not know, when he wrote The Amateur Cracksman in 1899, that his story would become a perennial movie renamed for its hero. The current Raffles is a fourth remake of the original nickelodeon thriller. It is also Producer Sam Goldwyn's second remake of the same film and his last picture for United Artists. He is now looking for a new distributor.

Directed by Sam Wood (Goodbye, Mr. Chips), with a creepy feeling for suspense, the present Raffles outdoes all predecessors by containing not only its burglarious namesake but two of the most accomplished scene-stealers ever brought together in one picture.

No. 1 Thief is still Raffles (David Niven*), cricketer and second-story man, whose faulty sense of property rights is corrected by a great love (Olivia de Havilland). In the first Goldwyn version, Ronald Colman played Raffles with ardor. David Niven plays the part with crookish cunning. But Niven's cunning is no match for Scotland Yard in the person of Dudley Digges. As canny, candy-munching In spector Mackenzie, Actor Digges, who can lift a scene with less effort than Raffles steals a necklace, pilfers most of the picture. What he leaves is filched by Dame May Whitty (the lady of The Lady Vanishes). Their threefold larcenies make entertainment as pleasant as pointless.

Remember the Night (Paramount). Rising young lawyers in the D. A.'s office will think twice, after seeing this picture, before bailing a personable shoplifter out of jail or taking her home to Indiana for Christmas. This improbable beginning, which trade-paper commentators call the picture's "distinctly unique premise," launches a tearful story that rambles through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and back to New York by way of Canada. Flattened rather than broadened by so much travel, it winds up as improbably as it started.

Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) is as honest-looking a lass as ever walked out of a Fifth Avenue jewelry store with some body else's bracelet, was arrested for trying to pawn it. Down on the farm, Prosecutor Sargent's (Fred MacMurray) old mother just knows Lee is honest. But when, amidst Christmas festivities, right out of Currier & Ives, Shoplifter Leander evinces affection for Lawyer Sargent, good old mother goes right to work on Lee, makes it clear that though she may be honest, she isn't eligible. Chastened by this contact with the soil, Lee decides to pay her debt to society, goes to jail.

Producer Mitchell Leisen's brisk directing keeps the disjointed story rolling, makes a rather enjoyable, sometimes moving film out of what is essentially an implausible, episodic, mushy tale replete with stock characters and situations. Even vivacious, bounding Fred MacMurray acts the part of the hard-shelled, softhearted attorney with such restraint as to suggest that Director Leisen kept him handcuffed during production.

* Back in England, David Niven fortnight ago announced his engagement to War Nurse Ursula Kenyon-Slaney, daughter of Captain Robert Orlando Rodolph Kenyon-Slaney, of Hatton Grange, Shifnal, Shropshire, and Lady Mary Gilmour. Then Cinemactor Niven joined the British Army.

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