The New Pictures, Nov. 7, 1949

Red, Hot and Blue (Paramount) is musical slapstick featuring Betty Hutton who, given a few comic situations and lively rhythms, appears to be a fissionable element exploding into energy and noise.

As a stage-struck hayseed from Ohio, Betty is in love with a struggling young director (Victor Mature). She is also in love with the tinsel night life of the big city, a yen which presently involves her in murder and a violent brush with the underworld.

Funniest spot in the show: a jump version of Hamlet in which Betty plays a scraggy, wild-eyed Ophelia. At her noisiest in her songs, she has the force of a pneumatic drill and the range of a fire siren.

Director John Farrow not only helped to write a pretty lively script, but managed to keep his highly volatile star and story under control. Also doing double duty is Songwriter Frank Loesser who, besides contributing a nice burlesque of a marcelled thug named Hair-Do Lempke, composed the songs which Betty sandwiches in between her Keystone clowning.

Tokyo Joe (Columbia) is a seedy melodrama jerry-built from bits & pieces of half a dozen old Humphrey Bogart thrillers. The movie’s weary, grey air is due to its stolid dependence on what has become a Bogart stencil; as a scowling rebel who just wants to be left alone by laws, red tape and good works, half-villain Hero Bogart is repeatedly maneuvered by his better nature into warring against evil. In his recent Key Largo, the malevolent-browed hero blocked the return of Capone-style gangsterism to the U.S., and in the soon-to-be-released Chain Lightning his visionary test-piloting insures the safety of kids who will fly jet-propelled airplanes. In Tokyo, he foils the resurgence of Japanese militarism.

The new film has enough seamy passion, sordid heroism, and familiar props (a smoky nightclub like the one in Casablanca, repeated torch-singing of a Tin Pan Alley tune) to make it a caricature of a Bogart film. Wearing his old trench coat and mouthing a cigarette. Bogart returns to Tokyo after the war to start a small freight airline backed by a blank-faced racketeer (oldtime silent Cinemactor Sessue Hayakawa). By the time the comic-book plot has run its course, Bogart has saved his ex-wife (Florence Marly) from exposure as a Tokyo Rose, stopped the infiltration of war criminals, and rescued his small daughter from Hayakawa.

Unfortunately, the picture is not saved by the presence in the Bogart role of a tired, beat-up-looking actor who no longer seems to project the hard combustibility that he made famous. But Director Stuart Heisler accomplished one notable feat: by expert trick photography, impressionistic lighting and a tense atmosphere, he gives the impression that the movie was filmed entirely in the streets and houses of Tokyo.

Christopher Columbus (Rank; Universal-International) turns an exciting bit of history into a series of dull tableaux in antiqued color. Even ten-year-olds, at whom this British-made movie is plainly aimed, will find it about as thrilling as an afternoon spent looking at Christmas cards.

The discovery of the New World is practically shoved out of the movie by listless court intrigue directed against Columbus (Fredric March), by a palace hanger-on (Francis Sullivan),”who is trying to protect some real estate holdings in he Canary Islands. Columbus’ Atlantic journey—viewed mostly by a camera on a fourth boat—shows the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria in silhouette, bobbing around like toy boats in a bathtub. Columbus’ men, weighted down by thick makeup, jewelry, and rented fancy-dress costumes, do little but grouse about their historic mission and sit around waiting for San Salvador to bump into them.

Columbus seems to be trying for the pageantry of Henry V, but no one thought to get a script as good as the one Laurence Olivier got from Shakespeare.