Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 16, 1939

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Sabotage (Republic) starts out right innocently as that folksy love story about the young airplane mechanic and the traveling show girl in the quietest little Mid-American village in Hollywood. But when it shows U. S. average citizens organized by some mysterious agency to wreck airplanes, spoil machines, plant bombs by night in factories where the bomb-planters make their living by day, then uncorks a Hollywood program of vigilantes and kangaroo courts for dealing with them, Sabotage begins to look like the well-timed opening gun in a campaign to shoot for the witch-hunter trade.

When every military plane young Mechanic Tommy Grayson (Gordon Oliver) works on crashes, G-men arrest him on the day he is to be married to Show Girl Gail (Arleen Whelan), force the plant to close. Tommy's father, mild-eyed, poker-faced Major Grayson ( Charles Grapewin), native as a corn shuck, sets out to prove him innocent. By such slightly off-the-record stunts as burglarizing the plane factory and carrying off Tommy's gauges to check, breaking into a neighbor's house and rifling his closet, the Major sleuths out a sabotage gang, finds most of them are just his sourer-faced neighbors. Whether they blow things up for Nazi gold or just for the heck of it remains as mysterious as where their bombs come from. With the help of three Spanish-American War cronies, World War veterans, other hastily mobilized vigilantes, the Major drags his suspects before a kangaroo court in the plane plant, makes them confess.

Good shot: swarming vigilantes marching on two levels (across a high bridge and down a long flight of stairs) that seems to come straight out of famed Bolshevik Director Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin.

Intermezzo (Selznick-lnternational) is a pleasant, leisurely filming of an off-key love episode in the life of a middle-aged man with a middle-aging wife (Edna Best). In Hollywood's current concern with musicians, it plays a thin, modest, molto andante treble to such thumping pictures as They Shall Have Music (Jascha Heifetz), The Star Maker (Walter Dam-rosch). Rare top notes are contributed by Ingrid Bergman, Sweden's leading cinemactress, whose grave good looks, lit by a big-mouthed smile, make her one of the most promising Scandinavian exports since Garbo.

Though he fiddles away most of his time on tour, world-famous Violinist Holger (Leslie Howard) is just a homebody at heart until he meets Anita (Ingrid Bergman), who is giving piano lessons to Holger's eight-year-old daughter (Ann Todd). Holger hears Anita play, falls in love with her. When he goes on tour again, Anita accompanies him, not only on the piano. But when Holger begins to long for home and daughter, Anita, realizing what the score is, runs off to Paris to study. As his daughter dashes across the street to greet homing Holger, a car hits her. Housebroken Holger and his wife are reconciled as a doctor reports the child will live.

Though Cinemactress Bergman is ballyhooed as something producers dream of—a star who can really play the piano—in Intermezzo neither she nor Leslie Howard plays a note. Anita's pianoises are made offset for her by Norma Boleslawski, wife of late, great Director Richard Boleslawski. Famed Violinist Toscha Seidel plays second fiddle for Leslie Howard.