The New Pictures, Aug. 3, 1942

(2 of 2)

She might have been just that if she had followed her Maplewood, NJ. high-school teacher's advice to take up typing because "you can't make money as an actress." Teresa's present salary is about $1,000 a week. Daughter of a widowed, peripatetic insurance salesman, she once played a rippling brook in a grade-school pageant, a few roles in high-school plays. Then, unable to type fast enough to pass her stenographer's tests, she put in two solid summers with the Wharf Theater players in Provincetown, Mass., thence sailed right on to Broadway.

After two years in Life With Father she was spotted by Goldwyn, who now boasts: "I knew she was a great actress before the first act was over." At any rate, he signed her to play Bette Davis' daughter in The Little Foxes. The reward for her performance was a choice role in Mrs. Miniver. Says William Wyler, who directed both pictures: "She can do nothing wrong. . . . I've never had less trouble directing anyone. She has the one best asset any actor can have: she has never committed an error in acting taste."

With a perfect batting average—three hits in three pictures and an Academy Award nomination thrown in—Teresa quietly pursues her private life on her new husband's walnut-treed, swimming-pooled, press-agent-free acres in San Fernando Valley. If Sam Goldwyn is right, this tranquil double life will not last. Says he earnestly and grammatically, apropos her role in Pride of the Yankees: "She doesn't need much ballyhoo. Far better the public should discover her. They will. She's got it inside, things you can't learn."

New Soldiers Are Tough (Warwick Pictures; United Artists). This Canadian propaganda documentary film sums up in grim news shots some of the bitterest lessons of warfare that the United Nations have learned from fighting the Axis. It is also a preview of the ways in which the United Nations are planning to show teacher how much they have learned.

The picture drives home lesson No. 1 when tinny little Japanese amphibian tanks snort toward Singapore through the Malayan rice paddies which Allied generals had pronounced impassable. Field Marshal Rommel and his mighty Mark IVs teach lesson No. 2 by blazing away through the Libyan sandstorms. Then there are the Nazi battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, on their dash to home port, defiantly steaming through the English Channel before the British navy woke up. A brief, shocking sequence of Jap soldiers executing a pair of Chinese prisoners suggests the basic note of frightfulness as a factor in Axis tactics.

The latest turn in British tactics is shown in an exciting sequence of Commandos training. One Commando attack is shown in naming detail: the destruction of fuel dumps on Norway's Lofoten Islands. This is the most significant fact about New Soldiers. For this picture, the latest in the Canadian Government Film Unit's World in Action series, talks solely in terms of attack. The first of the series (Churchill's Island), made over a year ago, spoke only of defense.