The New Pictures

One Night in the Tropics (Universal) has such happy effects on Jim, Cynthia, Steve and Mickey (respectively Allan Jones, Nancy Kelly, Robert Cummings, Peggy Moran), four irrepressible romantics, that they are finally able to untangle an extremely involved knot of amorous entanglements. But before the salubrious Caribbean evening soothes their flaring tempers, Jim, Cynthia, Steve and Mickey scramble through countless Manhattan days & nights uttering ill-tempered wisecracks like: "Kick him good-by for me."

Actually, One Night in the Tropic?, was designed as a major film operetta. Jerome Kern, aided by Lyricists Dorothy Fields and Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote five not-so-melodious tunes for Allan Jones's piercing tenor. Short, jaunty, oldtime Musical Director A. Edward Sutherland conducted the actors through the story by the late Earl Derr Biggers. Top-flight Cinematographer Joseph Valentine ran the camera. Yet together, this combination of Hollywood's ablest backstage talent accomplished no more than a jumbled exaggeration of the Boy Meets Girl motif with scattered comic turns by Radio Zanies Abbott and Costello.

Blackout (United Artists) gives U. S. cinemaddicts a view of what the British cinema has been up to since war began. Telling a conventional spy story against a background of contemporary England, it needles audiences by casually photographed scenes of the Royal Navy conducting its blockade, life in London during a bombing and blackout.

It also indicates the effect war has had on Britain's supply of young leading men. When the story opens on a Danish freighter captained by scowling Conrad Veidt, his usually villainous demesne has been transformed into the habitat of rugged Scandinavians. After his ship is interned in a British port, and he courts mysterious but pretty Valerie Hobson during a blackout, it begins to appear that Veidt may be on the Right Side for once. When they both were captured and held by German spies, he is obviously all there is left a hero.

Although Blackout's dramatic and artistic qualities are well below war or peacetime par, it is an interesting documentation of how Britons live and act today.

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