The New Pictures

Just when vacation trips to the East and West Indies have been crippled by war, up comes Hollywood with a couple of vicarious cruises-and no more expensive than the price of a cinema ticket.

Twentieth Century-Fox's boon to the warbound tourist is Song of the Islands, a Technicolored musical which sets two of the studio's finest torso-bearers (Betty Grable & Victor Mature) down on one of the lesser Hawaiian islands, a curious place, half paradise, half fruit stand. There blonde Miss Grable, who is especially well organized for paradisal parts, doffs the sweater she has lived in at school on the U.S. mainland and resumes her role as the community's No. 1 lei girl.

Victor Mature also sheds most of his clothes. After watching bountiful Betty shake her seaweed and sing half a dozen songs, he succumbs.

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Paramount's Bahama Passage has one redeeming grace: fathoms of magnificent Technicolored shots made in the Bahamas. They have the authentic tradewind touch: the soapy green of shallow water, the blue-black of deep water, the yellow-white sails of fishing smacks, the paintless clapboard houses, the lassitude of tropic sun.

Director Edward H. Griffith was apparently so preoccupied with nature that he let his story go to pot. Paramount had given him plenty (Madeleine Carroll & Stirling Hayden) to work with. Beauteous Miss Carroll, once picked by enthusiastic collegians (Columbia) as the most desirable partner for a desert island, is admirably equipped for her tantalizing role. Ex-Seaman Hayden, blond and Apolloesque, is unable to make much of his.

Fourth-generation proprietor of Dildo Cay (pronounced key) and its salt works, Child-of-Nature Hayden parries civilized Miss Carroll's feral advances with reels of mumbo jumbo about the futility of woman's existence on the desolate cay. When he finally weakens, the best he can offer is: "We'd better fish."

Once Bahama Passage was in the cans, Actor Hayden enlisted in the Armed Forces.

Jasper and the Watermelons (Pal; Paramount) is a new departure in the field of U.S.* animated cartooning: it substitutes carved puppets and miniature sets for the drawn figures and backgrounds of the customary animated cartoon. Jasper, sixth of a series of ten-minute shorts which Paramount calls Puppetoons, is the first to enter successfully the animated cartoon's best realm-fantasy.

Jasper is a little Negro boy who can't stay away from the forbidden land of his mammy's melon patch. Hearing of a country where melons are free, he goes there with his scarecrow informer. But the melons aren't free, after all, and after he eats one of them, the other melons run him straight back to his mammy. Moral: don't talk to scarecrows.

This brief fantasy is keyed to a novel background score performed by a 50-piece symphony orchestra, to some Grade-A Negro choraling of Short'nin' Bread and Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen, and to some very solid jive. The result is a colorful, intriguing, three-dimensional cartoon whose smooth animation is the result of a considerable and clever technique.

The possessor of this technique is a mild, inconsequential-looking Hungarian refugee named George Pal. Son of an actor, an architect by training, he developed his puppetooning making advertising cartoon shorts in Holland.

Paramount agreed to put out his product if he would pay for it. He couldn't, but his undoubted talent persuaded enough backers (nameless) to set him up in business. Puppetoons are costly (at least $25,000 apiece) and have been on the market only 13 months. But the first one has almost grossed its cost, another (Rhythm in the Ranks) has been nominated for a special shorts Academy Award.

Puppetoons are made backwards, because Pal has found it easier to fit the animation to the sound track. None of his puppets move while they are being photographed; nor are they even made until every movement of the cartoon has been laid out in mathematically scaled (down to 1/10,000 of an inch) drawings.

When the animation is perfect, the puppets (some a foot high) are carved to fit the drawings. They require thousands of separate parts. One step by Jasper means carving 13 different sets of legs. The initial set is attached to Jasper, and he is photographed against the scaled background; then the second set is attached, and the operation repeated. The method is similar to Disney's--with a carving knife substituted for a crayon.

Such minute detail and painstaking labor would drive anyone but a true artist frantic. Says the 33-year-old cartoonist: "I still can't think of any work I'd rather do. I actually feel sort of like God sometimes. I guess this is about as close as anyone could come to actually creating something that lives. Anyhow, these characters live for me."

*In England, Len Lye made animated puppet shorts in 1936.

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