The New Pictures

Tonight and Every Night (Columbia) reaffirms leggy, red-topped Rita Hayworth's eminence as the most chromogenic of Hollywood's musical actresses; the warm Hayworth skin tones (of which there is a generous but decorous display) are delectably accented by its tasteful Technicolors. The film is also a richly hued dilation on two of Hollywood's favorite themes: the indomitability of the British and the inherent tenderness of show business.

Tonight and Every Night begins as a cameraman from LIFE prepares to photograph a dance number on the stage of London's Music Box Theater (motto: "We never missed a show"). From a fatherly old stage carpenter on the fly gallery he hears the history of the little music hall's gallant struggle to carry on during the blitz, and the love story of its leading lady, Rosalind Bruce (Miss Hayworth), and a handsome R.A.F. squadron leader (Lee Bowman).

From the time they meet in the theater's bomb cellar during an alert, Rosalind's affair with her flyer is beset by the uncertainties, urgencies and misunderstandings of war, and by the jealousy of a young 4-F dancer (Marc Platt) whom she has coached to a featured spot in the show. But in the end the flyer proves faithful (he was away on a secret mission), the young dancer dies in a bombing, and Rosalind carries on with the show while her new husband goes off to the wars again.

In a setting of colorful and imaginatively jivey musical numbers, this ingenuous little tale might easily, and happily, have been pretty well lost. That it is not lost is due in part to plausible and polished performances by Bowman and Hayworth, but mostly to British-born Producer Victor Saville's excellent direction. With a shrewd use of every sentimental prop that greasepaint and a war-torn London can provide, Saville has told his story simply, with a minimum of gush, and considerable authenticity.

Hangover Square (20th Century-Fox) is the excitingly horrid story of a large, bewildered composer named George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar) who overworks himself into fits of amnesia. A Scotland Yard doctor (George Sanders), who is a pioneer in criminal insanity (the year is 1903), helps Bone realize that during these blank spells he may very possibly be a murderer. Bone is advised to relax. He tries to relax with a deadly poisonous music-hall beauty named Netta (Linda Darnell). When she contemptuously uses his infatuation as a means to her own evil ends, he proves the doctor was right, using Netta's neck as a proving-ground. Still amnesiac, he plants her corpse on the crest of a Guy Fawkes bonfire, goes home and gets on with his concerto. Thanks to the prodding of Dr. Sanders, he begins to get his memory back while giving this work its world premiere before a socialite audience.

The flaming, grotesque denouement of this unhappy tale may leave audiences undecided whether to laugh or blush. This may do no serious harm, for up to then the film is very good. Patrick Hamilton's novel was a more relentless, less decorative study of the effects of cruelty on a sick mind. But this is. a top-drawer horror picture, in which Joseph LaShelle's distinguished photography gets the last glint of fancy fright out of the pomps and vanities of the turn of the century. Michael Dyne and Glenn Langan are notably authentic as sleek sidekicks of the pitiless Netta. Miss Darnell will soon become, if she is not already, Hollywood's most rousing portrayer of unhousebroken sex. To her familiar assets she adds, in this film, a memorably expressive pair of thighs and a proficient singing voice.

The late Laird Cregar, brilliant and touching in his embodiment of the hero's anguished, innocent, dangerous confusion, will leave cinemaddicts pondering sadly on the major roles he might have played. One of the most impressive things about the picture, and certainly the most unprecedented, is the concerto with which he accompanies his holocaust. The work of Bernard Herrman, it is for once not a pale-pink potpourri of woman's club classics, but the lushly introspective, resourceful sort of music a promising young composer might indeed have written.

A Song to Remember (Columbia) is a biographical romance about Frederic Chopin, 19th-Century Polish composer. It is very pretty to look at, and its abundant, well-played Chopinthology should delight music lovers.* Cornel Wilde, who studied piano for the role, is sympathetic and sincere, if ill-cast, as Chopin; Paul Muni is skillful if superfluous as his teacher Eisner; Merle Oberon, as the fire-eating feminist George Sand, is miscast but beautiful and intense; Stephen Bekassy is a plausible, professional-looking proxy for Franz Liszt. There are some effective scenes, notably that at Chopin's deathbed, with Liszt playing the opening bars of Chopin's noble C-Minor Nocturne.

But cinemaddicts should take along a pocketful of fair warnings when they go to see A Song to Remember. For it is a monstrous tissue of falsehoods.

Chopin was never a member of the Polish underground against Russian tyranny. He did not bring his good teacher Eisner along to Paris to act as a conscience (he needed, in fact, no help in that respect). He was not sold to Parisian society by George Sand. He did not forsake his old teacher, his love of Poland or the composition of patriotically inspired music because of Sand or for any other reason or, indeed, at all. at any time.

He did not, under Sand's influence, learn about and compose art-for-art's-sake music, nor was his non-nationalistic music, as the picture implies, any more or less great or valuable than--or different from--the nationalistic. He was not won back to a patriotism he had never lost by Eisner or by the reappearance of his former sweetheart Constanzia, who never came to Paris and for that matter never gave him much time.

He did not, when he was dying of consumption, make a suicidal nonstop concert tour of Europe's capitals to raise money for the Polish cause. (Ho gave one such concert, in London.) He was not, in fact, either a moral doughnut, a lapdog, an all-round nincompoop, or in any essential political sense a revolutionist or even a rebel; nor was his great music at the beck & call of any allegiance or dominance or affection.

The film at times seems even to go out of its way to be perversely inaccurate: Kalkbrenner, a great pianist who admired Chopin, is represented as a critic, devoid of ear or honor, who did his best to obstruct Chopin's career. Such minor inaccuracies as this last, silly as they are, might be forgivable. It is harder to forgive the total misrepresentation of the conduct and character of a great man and of the source and nature of great art.

* Jose Iturbi, who made the recordings cannot be officially credited because of his contract entanglement with M.G.M.

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