Americans are already deeply indebted to the Marines of Wake and Midway, but making pictures like "To the Shores of Tripoli" is no way to pay off the debt. In fact, a few more like it and the Marines will be the laughing as well as the fighting stock of the nation. The acting isn't bad--John Payne, Maureen O'Hara and Randolph Scott have no trouble giving adequate performances. But any resemblance between the story here and a good plot, or between this film and an honest-to-goodness he-man thriller is very well camouflaged. Instead of the Marines making a man out of the Culver kid, John Payne, he turns around and makes mincemeat out of them, and it takes Pearl Harbor at the end of the picture to interest him in the glories of the life of a Marine. What should have been the thriller of the year develops into a rehash of Frank Merriwell, tame enough for Grandma, too trite for anyone else.

"The Remarkable Andrew" is far from trite, but equally dull. Its rather weird plot concerns the plight of Andrew Long, a strait-laced city employee who is framed by crooked politicians. With the unseen help of the ghost of his namesake Andy Jackson (not to mention the spirits of Washington, Marshall, Jefferson, Franklin, etc.) Andrew Long finally manages to extricate himself. But for a while in the picture even his friends wonder a bit when they observe him talking to people they can't see. Meanwhile the audience is just as baffled by the superfluity of ghosts whose figures they can see but whose purpose they can't imagine.