Joan of Paris (RKO-Radio) is a U.S. coming-out party for an attractive pair of European refugees: France's green-eyed Michele Morgan and Austria's Paul Henreid. Both make graceful bows. Mile. Morgan is an arresting personality, whose role calls for only a minimum of acting.
Joan is concerned with the present fortunes of Occupied France. Hero Henreid is a Free French R.A.F. pilot shot down near Paris with his bomber crew; Heroine Morgan is a Parisian barmaid who, like a latter-day St. Joan, sacrifices herself that the R.A.F.ers may escape to England.
Because it is virtually impossible to make current history credible on the screen, Joan is more melodrama than tragedy. But Director Robert Stevenson knows how to curl the hair: he moves his camera with breath-holding suspense through the Gestapo shadows of occupied Paris.
Ominous is the word for Alexander Granach's performance as a Gestapo bloodhound. The squat, square-headed, muscle-bound sleuth ticks along with the sinister near silence of a clock. He never speaks; his approach is heralded by the patient squeak of his shoes. Actor Granach knew his role well. One of Germany's best actors, but a Jew, he escaped from his country a stride ahead of the real Gestapo.
Joan of Paris is the coproduct of two Hollywood youngsters whose backgrounds, untypical of the popular idea of Hollywood, suggest the change that has slowly been taking place in the movies since they learned how to talk.
Producer David Hempstead, 33, broad-browed and volatile, who broke the Hollywood ice with Kitty Foyle, quit his job as Utah's Corporation Commissioner to become an RKO script reader at $30 a week. Son of a well-fixed Salt Lake City attorney, Hempstead talked to Hollywood's elder statesmen from the start in the language they understood. "You're just exactly 150% wrong!" became his standard utterance.
He also settled down (as writer, assistant producer, etc.) to learn the business. He once had a derby-hatted wooden Oscar made for himself, with the inscription: "In honor of Nunnally Johnson [astute producer and Hempstead crony] and David Hempstead, who are exactly 22½ years ahead of their time." Says he: "Oscar is to remind me I'm good; the derby hat to keep me from getting swell-headed about it."
Unlike his night-blooming colleague, meticulous Robert Stevenson, 36, moved into his directorship with the precision of a mathematics teacher. Son of an English businessman, he took a "first" in mathematics at Cambridge University. A postgraduate thesis on the psychology of the cinema got him so interested in the subject that he persuaded Gaumont-British to take him on as a reader.
Not until six years ago did Stevenson consider himself fit to direct a picture. By that time he knew his business, had visited Germany and France to study their excellent camera technique. The public liked his first picture (Tudor Rose), and Hollywood liked his second (Nine Days a Queen), offered him a contract. Says he: "There probably won't be a great movie made until the year 2000. Why? It took 1,800 years to produce a Beethoven, 1,600 years to produce a Rembrandt."