The New Pictures

Captains Courageous (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

Ten-year-old Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew), too full of chocolate ice cream sodas, slips under the rail of a transatlantic liner's boat deck, bellywhops down into the icy waters of the Newfoundland fishing banks. Awaking in the fo'c'sle of a Gloucester fishing schooner, Harvey discovers he is in a world where the mysterious emollient of wealth fails to lay a calming film on the stern civilization aboard ship, to say nothing of the waters churning overside. Skipper Disko (Lionel Barrymore) of the We're Here signs Harvey on as a member of his crew at $3 a month, explaining that he cannot put back into Gloucester until the fore and after holds are full of fish, by which time Harvey will have earned $9. In the sweat-steaming, overheated fo'c'sle, sometimes in the dory of Manuel (Spencer Tracy), the Portuguese crew member who boat-hooked him from the liner's creaming wake, always beset by the wild and hairy faces of these shipmates whose lives, like their bodies, had been twisted into frightening shapes by their long combat with the sea. Harvey begins his quest for something he can chart a course by.

Captains Courageous, a dry-docked, refitted version of Rudyard Kipling's brassbound tale, relates two stories. One is Harvey's finding a model for living in the person of his friend. Manuel. The other is the We're Here's battle for her cargo, and her race home against the Jenny Cushman. Either alone would have made a good picture. Together, as luminous on the fantastic seascape of the banks as lightning on a ship's masthead, they make a fine one. So magnificent are its sweep and excitement, so harmonious its design, that Captains Courageous ranks above most current cinematic efforts, offers its credentials for admission to the thin company of cinema immortals. It is during the We're Here's race to Gloucester that the interwoven stories come to their climax. After a night of reckless seamanship, both ships are standing clear, close-hauled on the port tack, all sails set and drawing, with the We're Here to the windward and astern of Jenny Cushman. Finding herself being overhauled, the Jenny Cushman craftily comes about, pointing across the We're Here's bows. By sea law, the ship on the starboard tack having the right of way, the We're Here should sheer off, but Disko holds his course. In a sequence in which suspense is built with a series of superb effect shots, the We're Here avoids getting cut in half, forces Captain Cushman to veer away. Immediately afterward, with her crew standing by to clew up the foretopsails, the backstays part and the We're Here's mainmast goes overside, carrying with it Manuel in a tangle of canvas, cable and running gear. Cut to pieces by the wire cable in which he is fouled below the waist. Manuel screams in Portuguese to Doc, the cook, telling him to have the wreckage cut away so that Harvey, his "leetle feesh," will not know what has happened to him.

Notable is Louis Lighton's production, Victor Fleming's direction; notable the screenwriting job of John Lee Mahin, Marc Connelly and Dale Van Every. Harold Rosson gets credit for the photography. Some of the problems overcome led to the creation of new technique for sea camera work--an "iron egg" camera swinging like a gyroscope, giving stability within five degrees, no matter how the ship may roll; a sprayproof lens, consisting of a disk of plate glass rotated before the camera lens by a motor. Technical Director James Havens bought the 110-ft., two-masted schooner, Gretha F. Spinney (We're Here), in Gloucester, sailed her to Newfoundland for key shots, then through the Panama Canal to Catalina Channel, where the fishing scenes with the cast were shot with live cod shipped down from Washington in tanks. For the race, the studio commissioned the Mariner (Jenny Cushman), once a Gloucesterman, later converted into a racing yacht by John Barrymore.

Marked Woman (Warner). Always alert for instances of social injustice suitable for screening, Warner Brothers, which recently investigated a Detroit scandal in Black Legion, examines a New York one in this picture. Based on the recent trial of Vice-Racketeer Lucky Luciano, Marked Woman reveals the occupational troubles of the trollop. It is a powerful and grimy melodrama, complete with courtrooms, district attorneys, killings, beatings, clip joints and dialog like, "I'll get you if I have to crawl back from my grave to do it."

Mary Dwight (Bette Davis), working as hostess in a cabaret, shares an apartment with four of her colleagues. Except for a charge of murder, when the night-club owner. Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Ciannelli), has a customer killed for not paying his check, her existence rolls along smoothly enough until her little sister, down from school for a weekend, comes to pay a visit. At a Vanning party, Mary's little sister is murdered for resisting rape. From this point on, Marked Woman is concerned with the rebellion of the hostesses against their boss; the efforts of a young district attorney (Humphrey Bogart) to make them testify; and the trial in which Vanning gets his approximate deserts.

Ever since she was a consumptive streetwalker in Of Human Bondage, Bette Davis has been the screen's ablest specialist in unhealthy roles. To her portrayal of its neurotic heroine and to Eduardo Ciannelli's of its hard-boiled Latin villain is due most of Marked Woman's effective- ness. Good shot: The last--Mary saying good-by to the district attorney after the trial, then going off with friends.

Internes Can't Take Money (Paramount) is a fairly skilful blending of two plots. Plot A is about Jimmie Kildare (Joel McCrea), brilliant young interne who chafes with his fellows under their stipend of $10 a month. In a saloon one day a gangleader named Hanlon (Lloyd Nolan) is stabbed. Using a lime-squeezer, an icepick, a bottle of rum and other bartenders' utensils, Kildare saves Hanlon's life. Hanlon sends him $1,000. Kildare returns it because taking money is against hospital regulations. This makes Hanlon his fast friend.

Plot B is about Janet Haley (Barbara Stanwyck) just out of jail and trying to find her baby daughter, whom her bank-robber husband hid in some unknown place before he was shot. A gangster named Innes (Stanley Ridges) tells her he will lead her to her baby for $1,000 or her "friendship." When she tries to steal the $1,000 Gangster Hanlon has sent to Interne Kildare, Kildare foils her, learns her story, falls in love and gets Hanlon to capture Innes, who is seriously wounded. Kildare performs another emergency operation and Hanlon forces Innes to reveal that the baby is in an orphanage. As the quaint finale to this sordid story, Mother Haley recognizes her daughter in a row of five tiny tots who line up appealingly before her.

Wake Up and Live (Twentieth Century-Fox) preserves for posterity, at one & the same time, the amiable radio feud between Columnist Walter Winchell and Bandleader Ben Bernie, and the uplift message of the best-seller by Dorothea Brande, from which it takes its title. That this almost impudently daring tour de force turns out to be wholly successful is due to shrewd manipulations by Producer Kenneth MacGowan and to a narrative by Screenwriters Curtis Kenyon. Jack Yellen and Harry Tugend which for sheer ingenuity is possibly the season's high.

In Wake Up and Live, Winchell appears as Wrinchell, Bernie as Bernie. The Brande moral emerges in the person of a modest little vaudeville actor named Eddie Kane (Jack Haley), brother of Winchell's secretary Patsy Kane (Patsy Kelly), who, when his sister gets him a radio audition, is so terrified of the microphone that he cannot make a sound. To cure himself of his psychosis, Eddie tries singing into a "dead mike." The microphone, not dead at all, is connected with the one on which the Bernie Band is broadcasting. Eddie's voice makes him instantly famed as "radio's phantom troubadour." Thereafter, Wake Up and Live consists of an elaborately braided narrative in which the main strands are Bernie's efforts to find out who the phantom troubadour is, put him on the air again; Winchell's efforts to beat Bernie to the discovery; and the efforts of a girl singer named Alice Huntley (Alice Faye), who has outdistanced both, to nurse Eddie's self-esteem along to a point at which the knowledge that he is a radio sensation will not totally disrupt his poise, which is still barely sufficient to permit him to sing into what he thinks is a prop microphone in his girl friend's sitting room.

On the screen, the competition between Bernie and Winchell is definitely unfair. Muttering "Yowsah," "Mosta of the bestah," and other dubious coinages with which he has enriched the U. S. language, Bernie manages to chew his cigar with dignity but otherwise does himself less than justice. Columnist Winchell on the other hand gives a performance which indicates that among Producer Zanuck's recent screen discoveries he may rate as an attraction second only to the Dionne Quintuplets. Aided by previous acting experience, first in Gus Edwards' troupe of vaudeville children, later as a hoofer, Winchell's impersonation of himself is an improvement on Lee Tracy's similar role in Blessed Event four years ago. Best of the Gordon & Revel songs: Never in a Million Years.

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