The New Pictures

Take A Letter, Darling (Paramount) is dedicated to the proposition that anything can happen in an advertising agency. On this premise, it is not unreasonable that in the firm of Atwater (Robert Benchley) & MacGregor (Rosalind Russell) the senior partner should devote his time to pitching quoits and avoiding issues while his attractive junior does all the work.

That is the kind of thing Rosalind Russell has been do.ng in a series of career-woman pictures, most of which have made rather unfunny use of her firm talent for comedy. This time she has the welcome assistance of a first-rate Claude Binyon script, the expert direction of J. Mitchell Leisen, and a chorus of sweet supporting performers. Result: a very funny full-dress comedy.

The darling who takes Adwoman Russell's letters is dog-jawed, indestructible Fred MacMurray, an unsuccessful painter with a fallen stomach. His principal duties are to charm the suspicious wives of his boss's million-dollar accounts and to mind his manners around the brunette executive.

He does; so she promptly falls in love with him and raises his salary. All ends well after the secretary lands a big tobacco account with a campaign showing that most great painters smoked while they worked--it quiets the nerves, quickens the eye, etc.

For Paramount, bedeviled by the inexorable disappearance of young leading Hollywood males into the U.S. armed forces, the happiest discovery of Take A Letter is undoubtedly bright, manly MacDonald Carey, whose first cinemappearance (as the tobacco baron) is a bang-up job. Fresh from the corn country (University of Iowa, '35), young Carey moved into his first Broadway role as Gertrude Lawrence's leading man in Lady in the Dark. Paramount, which had previously tested and rejected him, took him when it bought the play. Now it can do nothing but weep over its new find. His draft rating is 1-A.

This Gun For Hire (Paramount) might have been designed for the carnage trade. A razor-edged melodrama, it possesses some of the most calculated killing to come out of Hollywood since the movies discovered gangsterdom in the early '30s.

The practitioner of the gentle art of elimination is a handsome, green-eyed youngster named Alan Ladd, billed as The Raven. A hired killer, he likes his work, and is not above saying so. Having polished off a blackmailer and his moll before breakfast he returns the stolen poison-gas formula to the chemical-company executive (Laird Cregar) who paid him to get it that way, and submits to one question: "How do you feel when you are doing a job like this?" Says The Raven, without batting an eye: "I feel fine." Before The Raven finally meets his maker and cashes in his sins at the Hays office, he has punctured a number of other citizens, both deserving and undeserving, met straight-haired Veronica Lake (a torch-singing magician employed by a U.S.

Senate investigating committee), and foiled a plot to sell poison gas to the Japs --altogether a good day's work for Killer Ladd, and a better than middling melodrama.

Actor Ladd, 24, is Paramount's other male find of the wartime season. Like his studio mate, he is also 1-A in the draft.

Native Land (Frontier Films) is an angry picture. Its wrath is directed at violators of U.S. civil rights, especially those vested interests who struck down American working men in the labor turmoil of the recent 1930s. Unashamedly pro-labor propaganda, it is, nevertheless, an eloquent indictment of acts of injustice and intolerance which did happen here and might again.

Most of these acts are taken from the files of the U.S. Senate Civil Liberties Committee. Producers Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand have dramatized them in sequences bound together by straight documentary interludes, highlighted them with perhaps the finest spoken commentary (Paul Robeson) ever recorded on celluloid and an effective musical score (Marc Blitzstein) accompanying the Robeson songs. The result, better as episodes than as a whole movie, is a shocking, stinging picture whose realism could never have been achieved in soft-stepping Hollywood.

Like some of the early Soviet films, Native Land is charged with power by its inline, unswerving theme. It opens softly with a camera portrait of the U.S. which free men have built by virtue of the Bill of Rights, veers suddenly into an outrageous violation of those rights: the murder of a forthright farmer (at Custer, Mich., in 1934) for presuming to speak his mind at a grange meeting.

From that incident until the final reel, Native Land seldom lets down. With a fine feeling for suspense and violence, it re-enacts the vigilante pursuit (in 1936) and murder of a pair of Arkansas sharecroppers who wanted a trivial raise, the Ku-Klux flogging of Joseph Shoemaker and two companions (in 1935, on a road north of Tampa, Fla.) for almost defeating a Klansman in the city elections, the untidy tale of a company labor spy etc.

These savage episodic passages receive the full benefit of Producer Strand's sensitive, pointed camera work, and of the remarkably natural performances of Fred Johnson (farmer), Art Smith (labor spy), Housely Stevens (sharecropper), et al.

Native Land's fervent faults are the faults of propaganda. It fails to identify the violators of its civil liberties, save by implication and by frequent mention of big business. It ignores the flies in labor's own ointment, advocates militant unionism as the future guarantor of the people's civil rights, almost forgets the Administration's efforts on behalf of organized labor, and displays small interest in union means or ends beyond an economic security guaranteed by organized mass membership.

Although it was designed to plead labor's cause and harps on a few notorious cases of injustice, Native Land is incidentally a powerful reminder of the necessity for guarding the Bill of Rights as a protection for those people who are wantonly crushed in all kinds of struggles. Despite its partisanship, it is as vitally American as Carl Sandburg.

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