The New Pictures

Under My Skin (20th Century-Fox) is based on the Ernest Hemingway short story, My Old Man, in which a son's affectionate reminiscence of his jockey-father subtly reveals the old man as a heel. With no subtlety at all, the movie uses the original's French and Italian backgrounds to give a thin illusion of novelty to a spavined horse-racing plot. There are also a few twists that owe less to Hemingway than to successful prizefight films from The Champ to Champion.

John Garfield is the skillful jockey whose well-earned reputation for riding a crooked mile keeps him off U.S. racetracks. To his young motherless son (Orley Lindgren), who tags along from one continental track to another, the jockey is a hero. After double-crossing Italian Gambler Luther Adler by winning a race he was supposed to throw, Garfield flees to Paris, takes up with a chanteuse (Micheline Prelle) and buys his own horse to ride. He looks like a cinch to win the Big Race until vengeful Gambler Adler demands that he lose it or pay off with his life. But the jockey's son, whose hero worship has barely survived a touch of disillusionment, is counting on him to win. In this kind of situation, even a cad can work up enough nobility to keep a little boy's heart unbroken.

The irrelevantly titled script gets no help from Director Jean (Johnny Belinda) Negulesco's studied straining for effects. Example: in Garfield's deathbed scene, a nurse gratuitously draws a window shade so that a shadow can fall over his face. Nor do the picture's hand-me-down roles make for good performances. France's Actress Prelle (formerly Presle), whose delicate playing was a major asset to Devil in the Flesh, has been transformed by more than a change of spelling. She is unimpressive in a role that makes her lift a wan voice in three interminable French songs. In a portrayal that is all mannerism and no meat, Actor Garfield summons up neither the appeal of a hero nor the fascination of a heel.

The Golden Twenties (MARCH OF TIME) is an hour-long documentary that sheds a nostalgic tear for the decade of the big binge. From the false Armistice of 1918 to Black Thursday of 1929, this well-edited paste-up of old newsreels recalls the fevers and foibles of the generation that lived on Florida booms, hip flasks, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Charleston, and the out-of-sight spiral of a rocketing stock market. Its faces range from the ludicrous (Calvin Coolidge in an Indian war bonnet) to the complacent (Jimmy Walker in a ticker-tape parade) to the evil (the pudgy, bland-eyed look of a paretic Al Capone).

Some hint of the darkening skies ahead can be seen in a Ku Klux cross burning, a race riot spilling along a city street, the scarred masonry of the J. P. Morgan & Co. building after the Wall Street explosion of an anarchist bomb. But The Golden Twenties mostly concentrates on the high, wide & handsome aspects of the Jazz Age--Red Grange swivel-hipping toward the goal line, Dempsey and Firpo in the ring, Babe Ruth putting the ball and ball game away with a long clout to right field. The nation, turning from dance marathons and speakeasies, held its breath while Lind bergh flew the Atlantic, Gertrude Ederle swam the Channel, and miners tunneled in vain to save Floyd Collins from a Ken tucky cave.

The middle-aged are not likely to watch the record of those years with dry-eyed detachment. Younger fry may find amusement in considering the confident folly of their elders.

Captain China (Paramount) is a gee-whiz sea yarn with a barnacle-covered script. It casts John Payne* as a tough ex-skipper. He is out to get the scoundrel (Lon Chancy Jr.) who locked him in his cabin, innocently sleeping off a drunk, while the treacherous first mate (Jeffrey Lynn) ran his ship onto a reef and left it sinking. As a passenger aboard another ship carrying the villains, Payne gets his revenge during a China Sea voyage marked by gory fisticuffs, a typhoon and romantic dalliance with a supposedly exotic tramp (Gail Russell).

The roaring typhoon effects are fine, though they never quite succeed in drowning out the dialogue.

* Not to be confused with John Wayne, an even tougher customer at this sort of thing.

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