Cinema: The New Pictures, Mar. 6, 1950

Chain Lightning (Warner) opens Hollywood's cycle on jet aviation with a great rush of supersonic hot air. Its jets fly much faster (1,400 m.p.h.), higher (90,000 feet) and longer (four hours plus) than any jet-propelled fighter yet announced by the U.S. Air Force. With Humphrey Bogart as a devil-may-care test pilot, its heroics are built to scale.

As the picture would have it, Manufacturer Raymond Massey's experimental wonder, the JA-3, will soon be outmoded by a model with a detachable escape cockpit. Bogart falls in with Massey's greedy plans to publicize the JA3 into acceptance by the Air Force. Having risked his neck for money to fly the plane from Nome to Washington by way of the North Pole, a reformed Bogart risks it again for ideals. He tests the new model against orders and sets the Air Force straight.

Tough-Guy Bogart still conveys emotion by baring his teeth in a grimace that gentler folks reserve for the moment after biting into a wormy apple. As the girl for whom he carries a torch, Eleanor Parker conveys no emotion at all. Much of the dialogue they speak does not deserve to travel at the speed of sound. To its credit, Chain Lightning uses expert photographic effects to wring plenty of excitement out of its flying sequences, suggests that a good movie is waiting to be made about jet aviation.

Paid in Full (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is a smoothly produced, competently played tearjerker about a self-sacrificing woman (Lizabeth Scott) who suffers & suffers. Having accidentally killed the only child that her sister (Diana Lynn) can have, she marries her brother-in-law (Robert Cummings) when his divorce comes through. Then, knowing that she must die in childbirth, she bears him a baby, leaves him to remarry her sister so that they can raise the child as a substitute for their own. The film comes from a story originally published in Reader's Digest. It is the kind of story that can be heard on the radio any afternoon.

When Willie Comes Marching Home

(20th Century-Fox). When Willie went marching off, the little town of Punxsutawney gave him a sendoff worthy of its first citizen to enlist in World War II. When Willie's troop train stopped in Punxsutawney one month later, the town gave him a welcome fit for a man on his way to war. But when the Army bogged him down at a nearby airfield while all his buddies went overseas, the neighbors began cutting him, his father wanted him out of sight, and even the dogs barked at him when he slunk through the streets.

Willie's predicament, and his way out, give Director John Ford and some able performers a chance to enrich Hollywood's current war cycle with what has been missing thus far: comedy and comment. Less cutting and vigorous but still strongly reminiscent of the early Preston (Hail the Conquering Hero) Sturges, the movie delightfully sasses Army brass, a small town's home-front foibles and the windy patriotism of the professional World War 1 veteran.