The New Pictures

Man's Hope (Lopert) has two outstanding characteristics; it is: 1) one of the most moving, most desperate and most original films ever made--for those with the eye and heart for it; 2) the kind of film that keeps U.S. moviegoers away in droves.

Man's Hope cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as entertainment. It is old (1938) and foreign-language (Spanish, with English titles). Its subject, the Spanish Civil War, has always aroused in the U.S. too little general interest or too much special controversy. It is Leftist, as well as antiFascist, and it was acted by nonprofessionals. It lacks the sex, the sensationalism and the conventional narrative grace of an otherwise comparable, fine film, Open City. Even movie highbrows may be dismayed by its jagged, fiercely uningratiating style.

This unusual film was made in and near Barcelona during the death agonies of the Loyalist cause. It was produced and directed by the famed French novelist and soldier, Andre Malraux, from episodes in his book of the same title. The film had to be smuggled into France, where post-Munich timidity prevented its release. Throughout the German occupation it was hidden. Malraux's first & only film, it places him--as readers might have guessed from the cinematic elements in his writing--among the few top movie talents.

The picture tells of its war--and of the world as a whole--in microcosm. On one small part of the front, hideously ill-equipped except in courage, Loyalist airmen prepare-to raid a Fascist airfield and to blow up a Fascist-held bridge. In this tiny, heroic effort, to no ultimate use, they succeed--and are destroyed in the attempt. In slow streams down the rocky mountainside, which are like the streaming of the nation's blood, the people of the region gather to watch, weep and salute, as dead and wounded airmen are brought down from their high disaster.

This prodigious and sorrowing descent is longer and more repetitious than most moviegoers will stand for; yet some will see in the iteration one of cinema's two-extraordinary attempts to create a massive,, heroic dirge.

There are other sequences which are dramatically confusing and tiresome: ragged little missions which fray out to death or nothing, and a succession of terse, disconsolate staff meetings. But as experiments in evocation--the way fighters look and feel and act--these scenes have seldom been equaled.

The film is full of inspired documentation which is at once more realistic and more poetic than any of Hemingway's. When the Loyalists make their crucial*The other, in Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925). air raid, they have to depend on a peasant who has spotted the hidden airfield near his birthplace. But the peasant has never been in the air before, and cannot read maps. From a new perspective, at a time when every lost second can mean failure as well as death, he can recognize nothing. In his despair, the face of this amateur actor submits to a tragic disintegration which Chaplin himself hardly ever surpassed. The peasant's face, his suddenly unfamiliar country and the roar of the rickety bomber, throughout this beautifully filmed scene, combine to make a heart-tearing embodiment of man's predicament and man's hope.

Slnbad the Sailor (RKO Radio) is an old-fashioned Arabian Nights charade. It has pretty Technicolor, fancy dress and a busy, fairly stilted plot that chases itself with too little humor through pirate ships and sultans' palaces. Very young moviegoers will doubtless eat it up. Oldsters who have already taken this romantically oriental tour time & again will not be surprised when the hero (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), with a perfectly straight face, addresses the heroine (Maureen O'Hara) as "Ah, Burning Bright. . . O Woman of the Roses."

Highly confused in spots, the story seems to be concerned with a search for hidden treasure. When the fabulous jewels and the gold turn out to be a disappointment, Sinbad springs forward to point out a wholesome moral: Where is true treasure? Sinbad [sweeping hand to heart]: "It's here! [clasping forehead]--and here! [sweeping Miss O'Hara into his arms] --and here!"

Anthony Quinn and Walter Slezak are suitably hateful as menaces, and Miss O'Hara is gorgeous in Technicolor. Fairbanks is energetic, but seems aware of the dangers of trying to imitate his late father. The elder Fairbanks would not only have given Sinbad more athletic bounce; while he was about it, he would also have slyly kidded the stuffing out of the plot's cloth-of-gold shirt.

Dead Reckoning (Columbia) would be quite a good thriller if it kept the edge and pace of its first hour or so. During that time ex-Paratrooper Humphrey Bogart hustles all over Gulf City, from morgue to Catholic church to cabaret, in his efforts to learn who rubbed out his comrade-at-arms (William Prince), and why. He becomes interested, particularly, in his late pal's hoarse sweetheart (Lizabeth Scott), in a suave nightclub proprietor (Morris Carnovsky) and in Carnovsky's fat strong-arm boy (Marvin Miller), who likes to torture his victims to soft music.

The plot boils up a satisfactory climax and the audience starts fumbling for its galoshes when the picture goes through its first red light. More, and duller plot--and then it passes another stopping place, shipping boredom like a leaky boat. By the time the movie decides it has had enough, the audience is way ahead of it.

Chief consolations: Lee Tover's crisp camera work; Wallace Ford as a retired safe-buster; and the enormously proficient Mr. Bogart, who can just sit in a phone booth and make a long-distance call to St. Louis crackle with life and interest.

The Locket (RKO Radio) is a dull blend of two of Hollywood's hardest-worn current themes: psychiatry and vicious womanhood. Laraine Day is a sweet-faced wanton who lies, cheats, steals and murders her way through the ruination of three remarkably gullible leading men (Robert Mitchum, Brian Aherne, Gene Raymond).

The story, like a maddening nest of Chinese boxes, is finally fished out of a flashback, inside another flashback, inside still another flashback. The reason Laraine is such a thoroughly.horrible young woman: she suffered a disappointment about a gold locket when she was a little girl.

Blaming adult misdeeds on childhood frustrations is a widely popular excuse among amateur Freudians. Nonetheless, church & state still hold a grown person responsible for his own sinful and antisocial acts. Hollywood is cutting figure-eights on dangerously thin moral ice by suggesting to its huge mass audience that an unhappy childhood not only explains but somehow excuses a lady's indulgence in bitchery and murder.

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