The New Pictures

Strange Cargo (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is The Passing of the Third Floor Back, laid in Devil's Island and environs instead of in a cheap London lodging-house. Tall, bland, humorous-eyed Ian Hunter is the Christlike central figure. The tangled lives he sets right are not those of petty, shabby, roominghouse misfits, but such splendid votaries of violence as Clark Gable (Convict Verne), Joan Crawford (a fille de joie wearing Miss Crawford's best Oh-God-the-pity-of-it facial), Paul

Lukas (cynical Convict Hessler), J. Edward Bromberg (timid Convict Flaubert), Albert Dekker (bossy Convict Moll).

Through the horrors of an escape through the jungle, a sea voyage without water, fights, murders, lusts and treachery, Convict Hunter comforts the fugitives. One by one he makes each criminal understand in his own case the words he reads the survivors: ". . . for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." Only skeptical Paul Lukas does not believe: he does not even understand.

Part of its strange power Strange Cargo derives from the tact, restraint and experience of Director Frank Borzage, who made A Farewell to Arms. Part it derives from the fact that all the actors are as perfectly typed as Joan Crawford, who, under one guise or another, has been playing Sadie Thompson so long that the part is almost second nature. Like her, Hollywood has been making Devil's Island pictures so long it has almost perfected the formula. This perfect Hollywood formula is turned into a highly unusual picture by the surprising performance of Ian Hunter as the Christlike convict. Always in danger of seeming preposterous, Cinemactor Hunter manages to be natural and supernatural at the same time, compassionate without becoming mawkish.

Virginia City (Warner Bros.). One day fortnight ago Virginia City, Nev. looked wilder and more Western than it has since the Grosch boys found the Comstock Lode. Warner Brothers were trying to outdo their last year's premiere of Dodge City in Dodge City by previewing Virginia City in Virginia City. They succeeded--with the help of nearby (22 miles) Reno.

On Reno converged some 20,000 cinemaddicts in all stages of esthetic and convivial excitement. They came by car, bus, train, plane. Present were the Governors of five States, 50 movie stars, including Errol Flynn, Miriam Hopkins, Randolph Scott, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Tom Mix, Mary Astor, May Robson, Wayne Morris, Ralph Bellamy. Three special trains transported newshawks from Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles.

Before the uphill pull to Virginia City (pop.: 500) time was found for a mammoth parade headed by Errol Flynn in fancy pants and six shooters, and Mrs. John Hay ("Liz") Whitney bestriding her $20,000 silver-embossed saddle. Also in the riding was pretentious Manhattan Saloonkeeper Jack Kriendler, but his saddle cost only $5,000. Leo Carrillo rode his horse through the bar and lobby of the Riverside Hotel. Others rode everything from cayuses to Cadillacs, but kept between the packed lines of shouting, hooting, yippeeing sidewalk fans.

A Virginia City movie-house manager, Joe Hart, thought he had discovered the Comstock Lode all over again. He promised his patrons not only the picture but another peep at the Hollywood stars in the flesh. He also jacked his tickets from 40-c- to $1.10. After a brief glance at the audience (mostly miners), Warner Executive Charles Einfeld hastily bundled Errol Flynn and co-stars aboard their busses, lest some of them might stop a whiskey bottle, and headed them for Reno and Hollywood.

Angry $1.10 customers swarmed forth into the little mining town's streets, mistook a busload of newspapermen for the missing actors. "Get them actors off that bus!" shouted the mob. "String them actors up!" While State police nipped the lynching, one wall of 80-year-old Piper's opry house collapsed on a spot where clusters of expensive Hollywood talent had been cavorting shortly before.

By the time the pleasure-maddened throngs got back to seeing the picture, there was scarcely a dry throat in the audience. Perhaps this was just as well, since the $1,500,000 picture was quite a letdown after the $35,000 premiere. The film turned out to be Southern-Western with stretches as arid as the Nevada landscape, few moments as thrilling as the customers' impromptu riot.

The picture was an implausible little footnote to history with Miriam Hopkins (a plantation belle) doing her bit in a floor show in Virginia City. Furtive Miss Hopkins, as anybody can see, is a Southern spy. She is trying to run $5,000,000 of Nevada gold to Jefferson Davis. Randolph Scott (a Confederate) tries to help. Errol Flynn (a Yankee) tries to hinder. Humphrey Bogart (a period gangster) tries to muscle in. Of course the attempt fails. Of course Confederate Hopkins falls in love with Yankee Flynn. In between are more rum, romance and rebellion, more tootling of The Bonnie Blue Flag than the world has heard since Beauregard fired on Sumter.

It's A Date (Universal). Producer Joe Pasternak has a knack that is pretty close to an art. And his unpretentious little comedies (Three Smart Girls, 100 Men and a Girl, Destry Rides Again) are as artful as they pretend not to be.

Pasternak also knows just what to do and what not to do with Universal's valuable vocal property, Deanna Durbin. He has expertly guided her through the difficult business of growing out of her popular childhood in front of a camera without losing her public. One thing he does is to surround the maturing songster, now visibly rounding into pudgy womanhood, with actors of the charm and calibre of Samuel S. Hinds, Eugene Pallette (who have rescued more pictures than their leads would like to remember) and Walter Pidgeon.

He has also taken soulful-eyed, sirenic Kay Francis, given her her best part for many a long picture.

As a story, It's A Date is no great shakes. It takes a light fall out of summer theatres, traces through various involutions the stage rivalries of an actress mother (Kay Francis) and her would-be actress daughter (Deanna Durbin). But there are a lot of bright dialogue, a lot of amusing situations, a lot of amiable people who have such a good time together that everybody else does too.

Deanna Durbin sings Love Is All (Pinky Tomlin & Harry Tobias), Loch Lomond, Musetta's Waltz Song and Schubert's Ave Maria.

Dr. Cyclops (Paramount) recounts, with a slight flavor of sadism, what goes on when a shave-pate, myopic, six-foot-two scientist (Albert Dekker) acquires an up-to-date laboratory in the Amazon jungles and a mania for reducing human beings (by radium treatment) to a height of some 13 inches. Victims of this scientific zeal are Dr. Cyclops' nosy colleagues (Janice Logan, Thomas Coley, Charles Halton, Victor Kilian).

Director Ernest Schoedsack, who co-produced manhunting King Kong, elephant-hunting Chang, achieved most of this picture's smooth Technicolored deceptions. Some were done by trick camera work and film processing. Some were done by using massive sets with doors 35 feet high, chairs and tables 12 to 15 feet high.

But realism and fantasy seldom mix even in the Amazon jungle. Result: the plight of the miniature actors, dodging for their lives behind a huge can of pork & beans, peering up at a towering rooster or laboriously sawing themselves slices of gargantuan boloney, is less frightening than funny.

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