The New Pictures, Mar. 26, 1945

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Hotel Berlin (Warner), complete with undergrounders, traitors and hot & cold running Nazis, turns Vicki Baum's old Grand Hotel formula to topical account. Its salient characters: an old-line general (Raymond Massey) trying to escape the consequences of plotting against Hitler's life; a diplomat (Henry Daniell) who is sorry he can't help him; a Goebbelsesque Gestapoman (George Coulouris) who gets thrown down an elevator shaft; an actress (Andrea King) who will help or betray anyone to keep herself safe; a handsome anti-fascist fugitive (Helmut Dantine) who gets help from her, and kills her when he can no longer trust her; a scientist (Peter Lorre) demoralized by Nazi torture; a stool pigeon (Faye Emerson) and an aviator (Kurt Kreuger) who discovers that Miss Emerson's lover is a Jew. Best scene: General Massey, interrupted at his shaving, trying to accept fatal news with dignity when his face is covered with lather. Best performance: that of Helene Thimig, wife of the late Max Reinhardt, as a heartbroken Jewish housewife.

To the Shores of Iwo Jima (Paramount), a nine-minute newsreel taken by Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps cameramen of the fiercest fight in Marine Corps history, is worthy, or almost worthy, to rank with such great war records as With the Marines at Tarawa (TIME, March 20, 1944). Shot chiefly on a terrain as shapeless as an ash-heap, as mortally featureless and cryptic as the flank of Captain Ahab's White Whale in their ultimate engagement, it lacks the relative coherence and clarity of most of its predecessors. It demonstrates, in fact, more clearly than any previous film, that war in its crucial essence is neither dramatic nor even particularly human, but paroxysmic: that it is simply hell on earth.

Even as you watch the immensities of a sea choked with craft, and realize the incalculably great massing and brandishing of skill and purpose assembled there, the whole motion forward has the involuntariness of a convulsion. Even as you look from a plane steep into the sea, and note the amazingly regular patterns of the wakes, it is more as if a stone had been gashed by the claws of a great beast. And along the ashen island, men and machines flounder and founder as desperately, and with as little apparent clarity of intention, as if they themselves were phantasms of dust.

Yet all the chaos is flashed full of human light and meaning. There is a row of mournfully dazed, wounded men in a boat, their shoulders festooned by a long sheetlike strip of white cloth. There are Japanese prisoners, by that fact presumably among the softest defenders of their island; and in their bleak, barrelbodied, flintlike power you will recognize if you never did before that the enemy is indeed tough. There is a closeup of a bullet-hole in flesh, at once as intimate and as impersonal as if it were your own wound, so new you cannot yet feel it. There is a shot made through the slot of a tank of a Japanese soldier trying to evade the machine-gun bullets which stitch the ashes all around him. Bemused, almost hypnotized in his dreadful slowness, fumbling in the footless dust with much the clumsiness of a terrified rat, he half falls, at last, behind a mound. For a moment, before you think, you may hope he has made it alive; but you will never know.

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