“The Adventures of Tartu” are the same ones that happen every morning in the funny pages to Vic Jordan, Race Riley of the Commandos and Flyin’ Jenny, but they have been transformed into a movie of surprising freshness and enthusiasm. The hero is the English chemist, Captain Stevenson (or Robert Donat in need of a haircut), who is sent by the British Intelligence to destroy a German plant that is perfecting a most deadly poison gas, and Mr. Donat goes through Europe evading the bullets of Nazis and saving the lives of many people, until he locates the hidden gas plant inside a mountain near Pilsen. There he places four highly concentrated grenades into important parts of the gas works, blowing them up, then steals a Messerschmitt from several soldiers and flies home, with the sweetheart he picked up in Pilsen. The American director, Harold S. Bucquet (who made the Dr. Kildare series), and everyone in this otherwise English production went to a good deal of honest, talented effort to make you believe in and enjoy these incidents: half of the time you do.
This is the occasion of an odd marriage, in which the English way of making movies by starting with an idea and proceeding to make the idea out of the materials of the art, is unfortunately united to Hollywood’s, which starts with a dozen or so formulas for pleasing every showgoer in America and then figures out a script to contain them all. The marriage is immediately indicated in a scene during the bombing of London in 1940. There is a two-ton bomb which has failed to go off but is about to, the bomb-disposal squad is called, and it turns out to be Donat, who must take the engine out of the bomb. Up to his entrance the film has had all the visual strength of character the English demand of their films, and as he straddles his bomb, looking for all the world like a mermaid riding an iron fish, he does as neat and pretty an operation of removing detonator from bomb as you could wish from the documentary-conscious British. However, just next to the crater in which Mr. Donat is doing his dismantling, a bed is seen, containing an injured child who cannot be moved, though the bomb may go off, and beside him, his courageous nurse, who won’t leave him for any bomb. The dramatic nature of their presence along with their brave conversation as they carry on with Mr. Donat, moves the picture bodily to Hollywood.
To attract one’s belief and emotions to material as obviously romantic as Tartu’s adventures are, the director must enforce the most exact sleight-of-hand realism (which Hitchcock made famous), or turn the movie frankly into fantasy, satire or comedy. The directors of Tartu do it the realistic way, trying to show the problems, moods and transitions of the story in their most significant, concise and plausible way. Mr. Donat’s adventures with the bomb, his airplane flight over Europe and parachute jump into Hungary (realized beautifully as a movie problem), the action at the construction job in Hungary, and Mr. Donat’s whimsical transformation into the person of Tartu, a precocious Rumanian with a sing-song voice, have the true richness of scene and action to make them believably heroic and wonderful. And in an occasional place—where it shows a fear-crazed adolescent’s face, or the war nerves of a wild-eyed young Czech—it does what no other war-fiction film has wanted even to try, and that is the showing of war emotion with all the power of the medium turned on, and so well it is no longer an attempt but an accomplished fact. But from the moment the love story starts the movie relaxes its hold, the affair itself is much too complicated and slow-paced to enter the picture in mid-passage, and it has not the virtue of being different from any average love affair in the movies, as far as acting, photography and material are concerned. The events that follow—the capture of the Messerschmitt, and the flight through the Wellsian gas works—are insufficiently original, believable, and deliberated on to be more than mediocre.
The playing consists almost completely of Mr. Donat, who has enough accents, characters and duties to perform to please a Barrymore, and Mr. Donat plays them like a Barrymore of the movies, the result being a clever performance of a chameleon character rather than a convincing, artistic one. The chain of events in Tartu has both too many links and some of Hollywood rather than English make, but it is constructed with a flair for and delight in adventure and in movie-making.
October 25, 1943