The New Pictures

Without Love (M.G.M.), a completely successful projection of the Philip Barry play, tells of a scientist (Spencer Tracy) who got burned by the persistence of a bad love affair and a widow (Katharine Hepburn) who got frozen by the termination of a good marriage. Without love, they get along so well as they work together on the scientist's high-altitude oxygen mask that they decide to marry. Without love, marriage, too, looks like a perfect setup--for a while.

Gradually and uneasily, however, they approach and finally achieve a meeting in the realm of normal human temperature. They are helped along by their compound jealousy over a wolf in refugee's clothing (Carl Esmond) and Mr. Tracy's former sweetheart, who appears only insofar as Miss Hepburn malignantly, funnily parodies her mannerisms, which is appearance enough. On the sidelines the widow's boozy cousin (Keenan Wynn) and a man-chaser vaguely identified as a real-estate agent (Lucille Ball) hang around with little to do but be likable, which they seem to find easy.

There is a nice lovestory hidden somewhere in the picture, and though there is practically no attempt really to explore or explain its possibilities, it somehow gets itself satisfactorily told. To a great extent Philip Barry, and Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the skilful screen play, are to be thanked for this. In spite of a painfully whimsical addiction to locutions like "by gum," they write several pieces of conversational love ping-pong and one jagged quarrel which make the average piece of would-be-sure-footed screen dialogue look like a sack-race on snowshoes.

Spencer Tracy is as good as their words, and Miss Hepburn, whose Bryn Mawr drawl and tailored walk sometimes get in her way, brings this sort of lady to life more convincingly than could anybody else in pictures. Lucille Ball handles her lowly wisecracks so well as to set up a new career for herself; and in spite of all this elegant competition, Ed Wynn's gifted son Keenan, as one of Barry's charming drunks, saunters away with the show.

Practically Yours (Paramount) is the story of a heroic flyer (Fred MacMurray) who outlives his suicide-dive at a Japanese flattop; of an infatuated former officemate (Claudette Colbert) who gets the mistaken impression that he is in love with her; and of their efforts, during his two weeks' leave, to keep the public fooled for the public's own, hero-worshipping sake. Though it recalls the brilliant Hall the Conquering Hero, the picture is in many respects just the sort of smoothly routine, over-contrived comedy that Colbert and MacMurray team so crisply in. Yet its artificial flowers turn out also to be a nest for some surprisingly virulent vipers; and much of their venom is good for what's wrong with the American soul.

The head (Cecil Kellaway) of the firm where Miss Colbert works and Mr. MacMurray used to, is 100% eager to exploit the romantic bonanza. While the hero is still believed to be dead, it is he who urges the heartbroken young woman to go on the air with a piece of made-up stiff-upper-lipping for bereft American womanhood ("You don't have to," he insists comfortingly); and it is he who urges her to repeat it, next day ("You don't have to," he again tells his employe) for the newsreels. When the hero returns alive, horribly embarrassed because he hardly knows the poor girl, it is the boss again who practically kidnaps America's most beloved couple and gives them the run of his house.

When the hero tries to sneak out to keep a date with a girl he does like, the boss locks him in. When he does succeed in getting near enough to a girl to make a pass, she bloodies his nose for his unfaithfulness to his overpublicized "fiancee." When he goes to a newsreel theater to see what they have made of him ("Hero of the Week," the billboard bellows) and can't keep his opinions on his stomach, an infuriated civilian turns in the dark and cracks him on the jaw.

In the long run, Practically Yours is not a very memorable or for that matter a very nice movie. But it packs a remarkable amount of nicely calculated hatred for some things very much worth hating.

A Royal Scandal (20th Century-Fox) was originally a play called The Czarina, a distinctly minor example of the Budapest school of perky lubricity. Some 20 years ago Director Ernst Lubitsch turned it into Forbidden Paradise, one of the shrewdest high-comedies in screen history. Producer Lubitsch's new version, which is directed by Otto (Laura) Preminger, has its points too, most of which are named Tallulah Bankhead. But all told, they just about manage to get the show by.

The story: Catherine the Great (Miss Bankhead), with the help of a cooney chancellor (Charles Coburn), is governing Russia after a fashion, but not firmly enough to prevent conspiracies against her life. A wild-eyed young soldier (William Eythe) rides three days & nights to warn her of one. Catherine, more impressed by his bright pink condition at the end of the ride than by his loyalty, rigs him out in an ice-cream uniform, promotes him through the military ceiling, moistens him thoroughly with champagne, subjects him to a dazzling blitzkrieg of carnivorous kisses, and turns him into a hopelessly bemused boudoir-poodle. His jealous fiancee (Anne Baxter), some further conspiracies and, ultimately, his own self-respect, bring the young man to his senses, and force the man-eating monarch to start her routine all over, this time on the French Ambassador (Vincent Price).

It is possible to be more wicked at this sort of thing and at the same time more tasteful by means of pantomime than by word-of-mouth; and when an actor is attending to spoken lines, even good ones (and these are only pretty good), his ability to invent expressive pantomime is almost bound to slacken. There are some rough, funny scenes in A Royal Scandal, especially a long, toast-quaffing, glass-smashing seduction scene between the Empress and the most faithful and willing of subjects. But too much of the humor depends, typically, on your capacity for being amused at hearing an anointed monarch bawl "Shut up"--which is good for one smile, or perhaps two, but begins, after a few reels, to lose its bouquet.

Fury in the Pacific (U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps--War Activities Committee) is a short depicting the Marines' capture of the island Peleliu and the Army's latching-down of its neighbor Angaur. The picture is one of a series which the Army is aiming at people in war plants and out of them, urging them respectively to stay there and to get there. It is horrifyingly well designed to serve its purpose. Few war films to date have equaled its record of the fury of war; none has approached its terrible concentration upon men in the act of killing and being killed.

In one such shot, already made famous in newspapers, an unarmed Japanese crouches dazedly out of his hole directly in front of two Marines, starts to run away, and is slammed to earth by a bullet in a death as curt and ghastly as any ever publicly released. In still another, one of two stretcher-bearers falls shot, and the head of the wounded man bangs to the ground. It is not possible to describe the sickening jolt in the heart and stomach which these and other shots give; it is equally impossible to escape the jolt when you see them.

Less petrifyingly powerful, but very persuasive too, is the Army's The Enemy Strikes, an eloquently written, well-edited sermon against the relaxations of optimism, which uses captured German film recording von Rundstedt's December counteroffensive.

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