The New Pictures, Aug. 31, 1942

Holiday Inn (Paramount). This first cinema conjunction of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire is a box-office bargain—an effervescent musical, spiced with 13 pleasant Irving Berlin melodies. It is whipped into expert froth by Producer-Director Mark Sandrich, maker of most of the Astaire-Rogers musicals.

Few cinemactors appear to take more pains than Hoofer Astaire, less pains than Crooner Crosby. Result: Crosby’s easy, casual banter is just the right foil for Astaire’s precision acrobatics, his wry, offbeat humor.

Five years ago Holiday Inn was a musical note in Songsmith Berlin’s melodious mind. He wanted to drape a Broadway show around a series of songs for U.S. national holidays. Holiday Inn provided him with the right framework. According to its episodic plot, Singer Crosby turns his rural retreat into a roadhouse on every holiday in order to make country life pay, and to give himself and Fred Astaire a chance to sing and dance.

Crosby needles Astaire (“That’ll be easy, like peeling a turtle”), makes sage love to the heroine (Marjorie Reynolds), ad libs at will, takes time out to kid one of his own recordings (“Sing it, sing it pretty!”). Two of the picture’s best new songs (Berlin threw in Easter Parade and Lazy for good measure) are his: Abraham, a solid swing spiritual for Lincoln’s birthday, and Let’s Start the New Year Right, which does.

Perfectionist Astaire, world’s No. 1 tap dancer, shows no signs of slowing down. Each of his routines has a new and different sparkle. One, performed while tipsy, is a deft parody of jitterbuggery. Another, a 4th of July number done to the accompaniment of torpedoes and firecrackers, is his favorite staccato buck & wing, with some fresh frills. A dazzler for any audience, it was a headache for studio technicians. Astaire could explode his own torpedoes, but the firecrackers had to pop in time with his fidgety feet. Technicians built an organ that would set off the crackers electrically, so that the organist could play the explosions at the right spots in the score.

For Marjorie Reynolds Holiday Inn is a plugger’s triumph. Before dancing with Astaire, singing with Crosby, she made about 70 pictures—from a moppet role (age six) in Scaramouche to college musicals, Boris Karloff thrillers, scores of Monogram and Universal Westerns and cliffhangers. Thrown in as a last-minute stopgap for a heroineless Holiday Inn, she recalled enough of her former ballet training, enough of her singing voice to get by. Blonde Miss Reynolds (real name: Marjorie Goodspeed) adds a Wild-West charm to the picture.

Moscow Strikes Back (Artkino). In World War II the Nazis have won most of the land battles and taken all the best pictures of them. Their newsreels, cautiously edited for foreign consumption, have daintily omitted the detailed carnage of war, presenting it as a streamlined holocaust in which the high-stepping Nazi backs make all the touchdowns. Moscow Strikes Back has about everything the Nazi films have had—plus the carnage.

Most of the shots were made by Russian cameramen accompanying the Soviet troops who pushed the Germans away from Moscow last winter. Their work makes a bitter, revealing, angry document. It shows, where words fail, the enormous physical impetus required to get a military offensive going in the paralyzing cold of the Russian winter. It also shows, by acres of matériel that the retreating Germans left behind, that their withdrawal was by no means strategic.

Some of the photography is spectacularly good. One of the 15 cameramen who made the film accompanied a paratroop division on an attack behind the German lines. It is all there, from the white-robed troops bailing out of their transport planes to the mopping up of their village objective. The shots of direct shell hits on Soviet tanks, of skiborne infantry dropping like dead birds before Nazi rifle and machine-gun fire, are as close to the front lines as movie-goers can safely get.

There are searing views of Nazi atrocities, which are allowed to speak for themselves: frozen Russians hanging grotesquely from a gallows; a roomful of naked children left like animal carcasses in a refrigerator; weeping women combing the piled-up dead as Russian troops hurry through the smoking villages after the enemy; the ruins of three national shrines: the country homes of Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Moscow Strikes Back is not essentially a propaganda film. It is a record which scarcely needs the restrained narration of Cinemactor Edward G. Robinson. It is full of information and surprises. The voice of Stalin addressing his people on the Soviet 4th of July (Nov. 7) is startlingly unlike the acrobatic orating of modern dictators. Russian Army and Air Force equipment is excellent and plentiful. Superb shots of the Red Army assembled in Moscow’s Red Square under a cold November sun show a well-disciplined and equipped force of spirited professional soldiers who look as if they knew their business.

Moscow Strikes Back is also the best newsreel yet made of Russians. For once, the cameramen’s equipment is good enough to show Russians as they are, not as they have generally been shown: blurred figures on a scratchy film.

Ace cameraman of Moscow Strikes Back is Alexander Schneiderov, who, while shooting the sequence on the paratroop raid deep in enemy territory, was machine-gunned by German night fighter planes as he parachuted to earth. Despite his wound, he fought and photographed for 25 days, until the Red Army caught up with the paratroopers.

Pardon My Sarong (Universal). Abbott & Costello, the outrageously low comics who are Hollywood’s best-selling double feature, have made this picture, under various titles (Buck Privates, Ride ‘Em Cowboy, etc.), about once every three months since their cinemadvent a year and a half ago. Like their aged-in-wood gags, it now has a chiefly historical charm.

As a magician trying to pull a hat out of a rabbit, a seaman shaving in a hurricane, slapsticky Lou Costello is a successful clown. But most of it is South Sea stuffing, Hollywood style, with only two notable exceptions: a breakaway tune called Vingo Jingo (authors: Don Raye and Gene DePaul), and radio’s vibrant-voiced Nan Wynn, now visible for the first time after her anonymous role as Rita Hayworth’s singing voice in My Gal Sal (TIME, May 4).

CURRENT & CHOICE

Bambi (Bambi, Thumper, Flower, Faline, Friend Owl; TIME, Aug. 24).

The Talk of the Town (Ronald Colman, Jean Arthur, Gary Grant; TIME. Aug. 17).

The Pied Piper (Monty Woolley, Anne Baxter, Otto Preminger, Roddy McDowall, Peggy Ann Garner; TIME, Aug. 10).

The Pride of the Yankees (Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Walter Brennan; TIME, Aug. 3).

The Magnificent Ambersons (Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Gotten, Tim Holt; TIME, July 20;.

Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, Richard Ney; TIME, June 29).

Yankee Doodle Dandy (James Cagney, Walter Huston, Irene Manning, Joan Leslie; TIME, June 22).