The New Pictures, Sep. 20, 1943

The Adventures of Tartu (M.G.M.-Gainsborough) enlists Robert Donat, Valerie Hobson and a cast like a jeweler's tray in the shiniest spy thriller since Night Train (TIME, Jan. 13, 1941). Many expert British melodramas baffle U.S. audiences because they are too exotically British. This one, directed in Britain by M.G.M.'s Harold S. Bucquet, is as intelligible to Americans as to Englishmen.

Robert Donat plays a British chemist who undertakes a secret, suicidally difficult mission to Rumania. His orders: to get a job in a Nazi plant which is manufacturing the most destructive poison gas in history. He must also learn the formula and destroy the plant in time to avert the use of the gas against Britain.

Agent Donat arrives by parachute, spends a few minutes disguised as a Rumanian peasant, then transforms himself into Tartu, a Rumanian Iron Guardist, reeking with pomade, corny gallantries and devotion to the New Order.

In a remarkably short time Tartu: 1) locates key friends and key foes, 2) gets the job at the gas works, 3) does a broken-field run through the intricate perils which arise from the fact that he is suspected by friend & foe alike, 4) completes his explosive assignment in the hotfooted course of one of those thrilling, dreamlike chases in which pursuers stick out their chins for the hero, great iron doors delay their closing just long enough for him to skin through, and a car and plane synchronize a getaway as happy, and unlikely, as a chain letter that really pays off.

In these exciting shenanigans Donat is supported by Valerie Hobson as the politically ambiguous darling of several Nazi big shots, by an incisively cast crowd of Nazis, saboteurs and undergrounders, and by pacing as shrewdly varied as that of a roller coaster. Miss Hobson, besides being a sensible actress, is one cinemactress who can really be described as beautiful. As the gigolesque Iron Guardist, rococo Robert Donat turns in one of the best performances of his career. All Tartu needs, to be a classic of its kind, is the sort of razor-edged melodramatic and psychological inventiveness which belongs to Alfred Hitchcock in strict monopoly and has been conferred on a very few of his compatriots, in very small doses.

A Lady Takes A Chance (RKO-Radio) takes quite a few. It takes a chance with one more treatment of a well-worn story-pattern (the Cowboy & the Lady), and emerges from the scrimmage with a broad grin to offset its black eye. It takes a chance with making the cowboy (John Wayne) rather more than a nice boy, the lady (Jean Arthur) rather less than a lady, and both of them rather more primordially interested in each other than the Hays Office likes to feel that people should be. Director William Seiter seems to have fallen just short of a new sort of realistic, deeply indigenous comedy. His picture is often crude, sometimes raw, but definitely worth seeing.

Miss Jean Arthur is a personable young New Yorker on a gruesomely predigested bus tour of the prewar West. The tour begins to interest her when, at a rodeo, bronco-busting John Wayne falls on, and all but busts, her. The pair recuperate in a deafening Western barroom, involve themselves in a saloon free-for-all, settle down to their essential business on a hay wagon and, after Miss Arthur misses her bus, in a sinister small-town hotel.