Cinema: The New Pictures: Jun. 26, 1939

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Tarzan Finds a Son (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Not stork-borne, this son is the adopted survivor of an airliner wreck on Tarzan's own African escarpment. Reared by Tarzan's mate, Maureen O'Sullivan, on antelope milk, the youngster at five looks like Johnny Weissmuller through the wrong end of an opera glass. He swims like a loon, rides turtles and elephants, fights lions singlehanded, lives just the life every tree-climbing young Tarzan-imitator yearns for.

In real life the young Tarzan (called Boy in the film) is five-year-old John Sheffield, son of English Actor Reginald Sheffield, who once had Noel Coward for an understudy. Starting out as a 4-lb. incubator baby, little Tarzan has been undergoing special, muscle-building courses of sprouts since he was two, learning to chin himself, perform athletic improbabilities and ignore fear.

Main feat of this cinema was not in thus delicately bringing Tarzan a son, but in concealing the fact that Maureen O'Sullivan (Mrs. John Villiers Farrow) was to have one of her own almost as soon as the film was finished. Cinemactress O'Sullivan undertook the role three and a half months before her child was expected, finished the job with only a month to spare. Cameraman Leonard Smith shot Miss O'Sullivan behind fern fronds, through leafy screens, at respectful distances, permitted his camera to drop no hint of her own infanticipation.

Five Came Back (RKO Radio). In a U. S. airliner headed for Panama City, twelve set out. There are two pilots and a steward, an old professor and his wife on vacation, an effete young man eloping with a millionairess, a big-shot racketeer's little son in care of one of the mob, a tough girl on the lam from her past, an anarchist returning to his homeland gallows with a captor to whom he means a $5,000 reward.

In a wild tropical storm the steward slips overboard, the ship yaws blindly past Panama City, finally comes to a desperate, forced landing in a South American jungle. One prop is bent, one motor dead, the radio transmitter out, but nobody is hurt.

Aground, while the pilots work to repair the ship, this ill-assorted group finds itself living out an experiment in communism, taking orders from the chief pilot (Chester Morris), lessons in exemplary citizenship from the anarchist (Joseph Calleia). Surrounding this jungle commune is a tribe of headhunters, who pick off two of the passengers, the mobster and the jailer, and beat war drums for the rest. When the patched-up plane is finally ready for a takeoff, only enough gas is left to carry four, and the boy. The anarchist pulls a gun, takes the law into his own hands, watches the right five safely off.

A good screen story, a capable unstarred cast and direction that supplies suspense of Alfred Hitchcock calibre lift Five Came Back out of the Swiss Family Hollywood class and up to the distinction of a sort of Stagecoach on wings. Director of Five Came Back was 35-year-old John Villiers Farrow, an Australian-born seaman-author-director and soldier of fortune who jumped a ship in Honolulu, worked his way to Hollywood in 1927, has been a cinemauthor and director there, as well as in France and Austria. As a low-budget director at Warner Bros, he fired no worlds, this year tried his luck at RKO.