The New Pictures

Saludos Amigos (RKO-Radio-Disney) is a good-neighborly, Technicolor whimsey that has made Walt Disney one of South America's favorite North Americans. Shown first in South America, the film broke theater records; one audience in Rio de Janeiro screamed so loudly for an encore that another feature had to be halted in mid-reel and Saludos Amigos run off again.

The film has four giddy episodes:

1) Donald Duck's adventures on Lake Titicaca (between Peru and Bolivia); 2) the stormy flight of a young Chilean mail plane named Pedro; 3) Goofy (Disney's canine cowboy) as an Argentine gaucho; 4) a "Water Color of Brazil" that introduces a brand-new Disney character, Jose Carioca, a dapper Brazilian parrot, who is as superior to Donald Duck as the Duck was to Mickey Mouse.

With exciting samba music adapted by Disney's able Musician Charles Wolcott, and incredible bursts of color that flow onto the screen as the film unfolds, Saludos painlessly tells North Americans about South America.

To make the film (and others to come) Disney took 15 of his staffmen on a three-month, 20,000-mile tour of South America. They hobnobbed with artists and musicians, soaked up so much local color that when Saludos appeared, South Americans instantly recognized themselves. He constructed the character of Joe Carioca from thousands of papagaio (parrot) jokes Brazilians told him.

Because their drawings speak an international language, Disney's party had little difficulty making itself understood. But one rainy day Musician Wolcott tried to explain to an Argentine innkeeper that he wanted to borrow an umbrella by drawing one. The innkeeper nodded, soon returned with a broiled steak and mushrooms.

Inside Fighting China (World in Action-United Artists) is an inspiring vision of the birth and march of a new nation. From the filmed happenings of the last eleven years in Asia, able John Grierson, head of Canada's National Film Board, has composed a documentary picture-poem showing how "old coolie-China died and out of the torment of war a great young nation arose."

Beginning with Manchuria, the picture swiftly telescopes the transformation of China's millions into an army. While cities are levelled and as many as a thousand Chinese are killed in a single hour, millions crawl westward along the roads. In the interior mountains they build underground factories, train troops, organize men, women & children to defend their nation. When at length Japan attacks the U.S., U.S. officers go to China to learn from experts how to fight Japs. In China they find "the very pattern of a modern fighting state."

Most thrilling sequence in Inside Fighting China is its picture of the Battle of Taierchwang. The Chinese lie in wait in the hills while the camera hovers over the Japanese columns advancing along the roads below. Then with a roar the Chinese swarm down, utterly smash the Japs.

But Fighting China looks beyond the battle, shows the Chinese building their new nation while they fight. Say the young veterans of New China: "For us, the ten years that are past are but birth pangs of our new-found destiny."

Keeper of the Flame (M.G.M.) is an expensive testimonial to Hollywood's inability to face a significant theme. The theme--that Fascism might offer itself to the U.S. behind a handsome and disarming face--was bought by R.K.O. about two years ago in the form of an idea for an unwritten novel by Ida R. Wylie, and shelved. M.G.M. picked up the synopsis for a fee, fiddled around trying to make it conform to Hollywood's formula. The long delay was ruinous--the film is now neither effective propaganda nor good red melodrama.

As projected by three of M.G.M.'s most costly packagers (Director George Cukor, Producer Victor Saville, Scenarist Donald Ogden Stewart), Keeper of the Flame sets Foreign Correspondent Spencer Tracy, home in the U.S. for a change of scene, on the trail of an idolized American statesman named Robert Forrest. Forrest's seemingly accidental death in a New England village makes Tracy's newsnose itch.

Clean-scrubbed Katharine Hepburn is there, cold, distant, beglamored, and Tracy falls for her. That is unfortunate, in a way, because she is Hero Forrest's widow, and after considerable melodramatic messing around the question confronting Tracy is: did she murder her husband to save the U.S. from a Fascist coup?

This impasse is resolved by shooting Miss Hepburn--after she delivers the picture's one forthright utterance: a diatribe on Hero Forrest's "antiSemitic . . . anti-Catholic . . . anti-Negro . . . antilabor" movement. For Stars Hepburn and Tracy and all concerned, it is the high point of a significant failure.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Shadow of a Doubt (Teresa Wright, Joseph Gotten; TIME, Jan. 18).

Commandos Strike at Dawn (Paul Muni, Lillian Gish, Robert Coote, Anna Lee; TIME, Jan. 18).

Tennessee Johnson (Van Heflin, Ruth Hussey, Lionel Barrymore; TIME, Jan. 11).

Journey for Margaret (Margaret O'Brien, Robert Young, Laraine Day; TIME, Jan. 11).

In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, Bernard Miles, John Mills, Celia Johnson; TIME, Dec. 28).

Random Harvest (Greer Garson, Ronald Colman, Susan Peters; TIME, Dec. 28).

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