The New Pictures

White Cargo (M.G.M.) is the second screen version of one of the worst and most successful plays of the '205. Starchy, ambitious young Langford (Richard Carlson) goes out to the Congo, around 1910, to help run a rubber plantation. As he disembarks from the Congo Queen his unstarched predecessor is carried aboard, toes turned up, Britain-bound. Says young Langford: "Blahsted hot today." His new boss Witzel (Walter Pidgeon) moves off, moaning "I was waiting for that phrase." Witzel gives Langford the advice needed to keep Empire whole and hale: "Never let the [native] men see you are afraid of them--and don't mammy-palaver!" Before young Langford is many hours wiser, he begins to realize what mammy-palaver means.

The white man's burden in Equatorial Africa (see cut) consists principally of Tondelayo (Hedy Lamarr). She comes from the jungle wearing a "lurong" (press-agentese for an alluring sarong), rolls the whites of her eyes, and in no time at all is saying "Tondelayo make you tiffin." Only the tone-deaf will think she means tea.

Under the influence of Tondelayo, young Langford gets lazy with the razor, easy with the bottle and sloppy with his ducks. When Tondelayo dances for him the Temptation of St. Anthony looks like a game of pease-porridge-cold. After young Langford marries her. she stops calling him awyla ("my man"), whines for new bangles, begs him to beat her. When he refuses, she starts calling the unwilling Witzel awyla, does her best to poison her husband. By the time his starchy successor is saying "Blahsted hot today," superheated Langford is steaming down the Congo, Britain-bound.

Cargo is what is known as a great "acting" show, and the cast give it both barrels. Acting may not be the word for Hedy Lamarr's job, but whatever the word is, she understands it perfectly. Obviously she gets as much fun out of it as she gives.

Nightmare (Universal) is a swift, amusing, amiable melodrama in which murder and Nazi secret agents are no great hazard for sultry Starlet Diana Barrymore. Promoted from pigtails (TIME, Oct. 5), she handles with easy competence a handsome negligee and a whiskey bottle. (She uses the bottle as an anti-Fascist weapon.)

As a young English society woman, Diana discovers a corpse (her husband's) in her study. A luckless American gambler (Brian Donlevy), who had dropped in to forage in her kitchen, obligingly helps her jettison the body in a remote telephone booth. But the corpse turns up again in the study next morning. After this, nothing is very surprising, including Diana's and Brian's escape in a stolen car and their encounter with a nest of Nazi conspirators in a Scottish castle. The Scottish proceedings end where they sometimes seem to have begun--in a distillery.

Ravaged Earth (Crystal Pictures) is the most petrifying record yet publicly shown of what happens to the human beings when a peaceful nation is attacked. Some 65% of Ravaged Earth was shot, during the 1937 Japanese destruction of the northern part of Shanghai, by U.S. automobile salesman Mark L. Moody and J. C. Cook, an oldtime moving-picture man. The rest has been put together from stock shots and from photographs made in Nanking by Seventh Day Adventist missionaries. Much of the camera work and all of the dramatic composition are as amateurish as a civilian's reaction to bloody slaughter.

The film opens with vignettes of China at peace. The best of them, in which street after bannered Shanghai street flows past with the easy nobility of a great river, have, in their mortal foreboding, a tragic magnificence. Then follows the steady, desperate stampede of a million and a half Chinese toward the sanctuary of the International Settlement (there are glimpses of the exquisite, half-awakened faces of still unharmed babies). Shanghai burning in its haze is a dim, catastrophic image of human shame.

The film moves on to the stand of that "doomed battalion" of 500 Chinese who, in a warehouse on Soochow Creek, held out for five days against an overpowering enemy furious with the loss of face. In the cleanup after the bombings, civilians, masked against the fetid heat, work with the quick callousness of corpuscles around a focus of infection.

Then come the atrocities around which the picture is built. There are corpses of guerrillas looted and thrown in the trenches to rot. There is a dead soldier upon whose groin an enemy has placed a heavy shell in such a way as to make a phallic joke. There is a prisoner crucified and reduced to charcoal; another prisoner buried alive up to his chin, his arms broken so that he might not free himself. There is, in a ruined temple, an untouched golden goddess of compassion, and at her feet lies, raped, bayoneted, dead, her skirts yanked high, a woman of 60.

Worse, there are the atrocities who survive. The picture is an album of atrocities. As such, it is moral and emotional dynamite whose use involves the user in some of the most difficult conceivable problems. There is no evidence that the U.S. handlers of the film are aware of these problems. The evidence is to the contrary. The film has been shown in U.S. Army camps, and the result has not been to induce sympathy for the Chinese, or even hatred for the Japanese--but simply and literally nausea.

We Are the Marines (MARCH OP TIME--20th Century-Fox), like one of its leathernecks in a Pacific island juke-joint, hits the jackpot of this-war realism. Where MARCH OF TIME'S The Ramparts We Watch (1940 release) touched on isolation and the threat of war, its second big film speaks to an America all-out for the struggle Ramparts could announce, not yet report.

We Are the Marines is the filmed drama of the amphibious Marine divisions which were first to receive invasion training and first to fight, die and win in the Solomons. The new Parris Island "boots" start liking malteds better than blood, learn the hard way the technique of fighting. But throughout the film, as training advances, one feels the folklore of the Corps, told in flashbacks to the palmy prewar days in Shanghai, when Sawdust Alley glittered with bar-girls and intrigue, and in the most realistic recital yet of the lonely, tragic struggles on Wake and Guam, where Marines made good to the last shot. The film states what Marines feel as well as what they do. It is all the color and excitement of a four-year hitch in the Marine Corps on the screen.

When the picture reaches its climactic reels of action and offensive battle, filmed by Marine Sergeant Arthur Steckler, ex-MOT camera trainee, audiences should feel the same brave emotion as Private Charlie Bulis, USMC, crouched for the first time in the bottom of an invasion-barge, whispering to himself, "This is it."

Producer Louis de Rochemont had the help of the Marine Corps as a whole, and, unexpectedly, of Col. William T. Clement, USMC, veteran of Bataan and a sterling actor. He has the film's most leatherneck and authentic line: "Blow the bastards out of the water! Commence firing!"

Gentleman Jim (Warner) is a fight fan's meat and a thumping good show. It films some of the best boxing scenes ever shown on the screen. As Gentleman Jim Corbett, the San Francisco bank clerk who introduced footwork and Shakespeare to the ring and knocked out John L. Sullivan in 21 immortal rounds, Errol Flynn flashes the fanciest left Hollywood has produced. Warners has surrounded him with the hilarious rowdyism of the prizefighting game in the '903, including a superb performance by Ward Bond as the great John L. himself.

Love (blonde, queenly Alexis Smith) and the facts of Corbett's life are allowed to interfere only slightly in Pugilist Flynn's career, but fans will not complain. They can see oldtime titans destroy each other with bare knuckles in gaslit, neolithic exhibitions of carnage-under-contract. Gentleman Jim's footwork is a joy to behold (and is beheld from all camera angles). The pictured versions of his classic bouts with Joe Choynski, Jake Kilrain, et al. seem, to modern eyes, even to improve on the originals.

After all this, even John L. might need a buildup, but one look is reassuring. Director Raoul Walsh and Actor Bond have recreated him to the life. In training camps he alternately obliterates sparing partners and barrels of beer; childern follow him in the streets and in barroms strong men quail when he roars: "I can lick any man in the world." Partician Miss Smith feels his biceps and nearly swoons with delight. Even though Director Walsh and Gentleman Jim make a monkey out of him in the ring, his gymnasial fragrance lingers on.

Warner Brothers, which has sunk $3,000,000 in three Errol Flynn pictures (including Gentleman Jim), is worried about the effect on its investment of Actor Flynn's trial on statutory rape charges, scheduled for next month (TIME, Oct. 26). But such opposition is not very likely to make Gentleman Jim kiss the canvas.

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