The New Pictures, Sep. 27, 1943

Johnny Come Lately (United Artists). When Actor James and Producer William Cagney quit Warner Bros., a year ago last March, and sank $750,000 in a new, independent production, plenty of Hollywood’s bigwigs wished them all the bad luck in the world. In trade jargon, the Cagney brothers were dealing “a blow to the industry.” If they succeeded, there were plenty of other stars, directors, writers and producers itching to try their own hands at independent production. And not even their worst wishers doubted that the Cagneys would succeed.

The Cagneys’ first independent film suggests that their worst wishers were dead right. Johnny Come Lately stars the man who was a top Warner’s moneymaker in a role he likes and to which he gives everything he has. It introduces to the screen Grace (Kind Lady) George, luminous in a role which should so endear her to U.S. cinemaudiences that she may well become overnight on the screen what she has been for years on Broadway — the official quintessence of elderly? femininity. The film it self is rich nostalgic fare, elegantly dished out, about small-town politics at the turn of the century.

The story, which manages to be popular and literate at the same time, tells of the efforts of a gallant old lady of reduced means (Grace George) to fight the local political octopus (Edward McNamara) through her newspaper. It also reports the help she gets, in dire extremity, from a hobo ex-journalist (James Gagney). En-route to victory the hobo develops an interest in the old lady’s niece (Marjorie Lord), makes a useful friend of the whooping, plume-clad matron of the local sin hall (Marjorie Main), and punches his way through enough physical obstruction to appease those cinemaddicts who like James Cagney chiefly for his fleet footwork and persuasive paws. As a period document, Johnny Come Lately bogs down neither in history nor documentation. Its historicity is chiefly an excuse for an unusual amount of pleasure in human beings, their relationships, the clothes they wore, the homes they lived in.

These pleasures would have been all but impossible to manufacture in any of the large studios, for they are given their warmth and life by the pleasure that the Cagneys’ large cast and the whole production outfit obviously took in doing a job as they wanted to do it. Bit players who have tried creditably for years to walk in shoes that pinched them show themselves in this picture as the very competent actors they always were: there has seldom been as good a cinematic gallery of U.S. small-town types. Grace George seems effortlessly to have learned what so many transplanted Broadway actors ache over —how to project her touching elegance in a medium new to her.

James Cagney, who in his time had to plant fists or a grapefruit on young ladies’ faces and shoes on young ladies’ behinds, here develops his tenderest relationships with middle-aged ladies (the Misses George, Main and Hattie McDaniel), and each of them is worth a dozen average love scenes. Edward McNamara (an easygoing friend of the Cagneys whose fine, fresh tenor Caruso once coached and whom Madame Schumann-Heink once “discovered” as a caroling Jersey cop) is something new and convincing in villainy. He looks like neither a swindling person or the unconfessed byblow of a neanderthal rake, but like the sort of hard-soft, period Irishman he is supposed to be. Julia Heron’s interiors look as if people really had lived in them. The direction (by skilled Oldtimer William K. Howard), the acting, the production are fluent, alert and reciprocal.

So Proudly We Hail (Paramount) enlists three of Paramount’s brightest fe-.male stars (Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake) in a heartfelt, but highly fictional, tribute to the Army nurses of Bataan. The three leading ladies are so comely even in coveralls that, despite all the realistic shooting, they spend most of their time fighting a woman’s war.

The story, told in flashback, reports the private and professional experiences of several nurses (Barbara Britton, Mary Servuss, et al.), three in particular, who reached the Philippines just in time for Bataan. Lieut. Davidson (Miss Colbert) does her best to liquidate her love for a Medical Corps Lieutenant (George Reeves) in the name of duty. She fails. Nurse O’Doul (Miss Goddard), a handsome 110-lb. of salt-of-the-earth with an incurable penchant for sheer black night gowns, kids around tenderly with a pleas ant ex-footballing Marine named Kansas (Newcomer Sonny Tufts). Nurse D’Arcy (Miss Lake), having seen her fiance killed at Pearl Harbor, is a personnel problem (see cut), interested in no men except Japanese, whom she is interested strictly in killing. She is removed from the story halfway through when, to ensure the get away of her sister nurses, she walks off with a grenade and detonates herself among the enemy. Nurses Colbert and Goddard carry on gallantly among bombed field hospitals and strafed wounded, until they are sent for greater safety to Corregidor. A further removal (to Australia) separates them from their romantic inter ests, who face imprisonment or death. In between love scenes that are not painfully overemphatic there are some very emphatic bombs, a shortage of food and medical supplies, and an abundance of nursely duties, which are sincere and effective though never seriously mistakable for the real thing.

Veronica Lake (with her hair up) makes a good deal of her short, tense visit to the film. Claudette Colbert most successfully sidetracks her prettiness for the more urgent priority of suggesting an exhausted young woman in coveralls. Paulette Goddard is easy to like in the fattest role in the film. She has a comic warmth and bounce reminiscent of the late Jean Harlow..Even easier to like is 4F (but outwardly rugged) Sonny Tufts, whose stumbling hands and voice develop wrinkles in the comedy of inarticulate love-making which are likely to become official among female cinemaudiences.