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Died. Paul Valéry, 73, famed French poet and philosopher, successor of Anatole France to the French Academy in 1925; of a heart ailment; in Paris. His infrequent, esoteric works (La Jeune Parque, Le Cimetière Marin, Varétés I, II, III, IV) brought from his distinguished colleagues high acclaim, from lesser intellectuals charges of obscure pomposity, from himself the admission, "I am a difficult author - it is my kind of beauty...
...started converging on us from the north. . . . Five-inch guns shot one down 1,000 yards off and another close aboard. Two circled to the stern and No. 3 [gun] mount shot both down, one so close we got our first casualty-one man killed. A moment later a Val [Japanese dive bomber] exploded just off the starboard quarter, injuring several men. A plane from the port bow grazed the No. 3 mount and exploded near enough to put one gun out of action...
Then guards drove Weygand to a private room at the Val-de-Gråce military hospital, Borotra to an elegant residence at 35 Avenue Foch, to await the charges against them...
...Body Snatcher (RKO-Radio) is a double-barrelled horror picture (Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) which Producer Val Lewton and his associates have developed from the Robert Louis Stevenson short story. Laid in Edinburgh in the 18305, it involves the tragic traffic of a young medical student (Russell Wade) and his brilliant teacher (Henry Daniell) with a grave robber who does not hesitate to murder when a cadaver is urgently needed for dissection...
...Like all Val Lewton productions, The Body Snatcher shows a humane sincerity and a devotion to good cinema unfortunately rather rare in U.S. movies. In this case, however, much of the picture is more literary than lively and neglects its crass possibilities as melodrama. The exceptions provide an anthology of eminently nasty creeps and jolts. The sudden snort of a horse is timed to scare the daylights out of you; there is a grisly shot of Lugosi's slaughtered head, distorted beneath brine ; and the last passage in the picture is as all-out, hair-raising a climax...