Other New Pictures

The Village of Sin (Amkino). People have learned to expect in any modern Russian film a cast of well-chosen actors and actresses with difficult names, acting competently and intelligently without makeup on their faces, so that they do not look like actors and actresses but like men and women. People have learned to expect photography so quietly beautiful or so imaginative that the best effects of Hollywood technicians seem artificial or flamboyant by comparison. They have also learned to expect doses of tedious propaganda extolling communism and episodes in which unnecessary impressionism takes the place of ordered storytelling. This picture of a peasant marriage includes most of the virtues and few of the defects of Russian filmcraft. A farmer who falls in love with a young girl gets his son to marry her so as to bring her to his house. While his son is in the army he rapes his daughter-in-law and has a child by her, which precipitates tragedy when the soldier-son comes home. Inside this gloomy framework dances the life of the lovely Russian countryside. You see how the people get married, do their work, say hello and goodbye. The Soviet propaganda is reduced to a little dose at the very end. Best shots: dressing the bride; the lecherous servant-woman in the hayloft; moving wheat on a windy day on the steppe; a family eating cabbage soup; the old man coming back from town.

This Is Heaven (United Artists). Anyone who likes the movies will like this trite, gentle little picture about an immigrant girl who falls in love with a rich man posing as a chauffeur. In the early episodes of their flirtation, and later, when love is frustrated temporarily by one of those misunderstandings based upon questioned chastity, you experience an atmosphere which has been for years the national atmosphere of the Cinema, but which is now being replaced by other, heartier, less elementary qualities of plot and treatment. Vilma Banky, who acts nicely, talks at times in a Hungarian accent, but fortunately neither the sound-mechanism nor the modern sort of wit in direction can make anything new or unfamiliar out of this story which has been variously told in pictures so many times that it has become part of a general background. Spectators will await, without fear of disappointment, the moment when the bridegroom leads the girl into a mansion, and in answer to her awed question as to who owns this splendid place, explains that he has bought it for her! Best shots: Leading Man James Hall buying a taxicab; Miss Banky showing him the furnished rooms she has rented as their future home; a subway jam.

Broadway (Universal). As a play on the stage, Broadway was memorable because the careful realism of setting and character made the high-strung plot seem truer than it was. In cinema the second rate cabaret where a dance team kept love and ambition alive in spite of the machinations of a master-gunman, has been replaced by a palatial and enormous nightclub with modernistic settings. It does not seem reasonable that the clients of such an establishment would pay to see such inexpert dancing as Glenn Tryon's and Merna Kennedy's. Features of the cops-&-robbers subplot which once seemed original have been used so often in other films that they are stale stuff by now. Best shot: Evelyn Brent in evening clothes.

The Man I Love (Paramount). Slipshod and silly vocal account of the love-life of a prizefighter who finds strength to knock out the champion when, on the point of collapse, he learns that his wife has not deserted him after all. Only good shot: Richard Arlen and Mary Brian honeymooning in a freight car for polo ponies.

Where East is East (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Lon Chaney is an old tiger-trapper whose half-breed daughter, Lupe Velez, is in love with a nice young American in a crash suit. Between the engagement and the wedding a voluptuous Chinese woman, Estelle (Mrs. Jack Dempsey) Taylor, once the tiger-trapper's wife, attracts the young man but is killed by a gorilla which remembers that she was mean to it some time before. The gorilla also chews up Chaney, who is badly scarred to begin with. He dies after the wedding. Good direction and acting may keep you from going home early in spite of the suspicion, later verified, that the best part of the picture was the opening sequence: Chaney catching a live tiger in a net which he and some Indo-Chinese helpers drop over it from a tree. Second-best shot: Chaney and Velez riding on an elephant.

A number of cinema people, among them John Barrymore, have said they thought Estelle Taylor was a better actress than anyone knew and that she had never been cast in a film which gave her an opportunity to show her talent. She grew up in Wilmington, Del., and worked there for a while as a dissatisfied stenographer. She married a Philadelphia clerk named Kenneth Peacock but had already divorced him when, later in Hollywood, she met her present husband, William Harrison ("Jack") Dempsey. That was almost ten years ago. Seeing her on the screen in one of the films in which, following an apprenticeship as an extra and in small character parts, she was being starred. Dempsey many times asked to meet her. Estelle, however, "did not like prize fighters." Eventually, someone who knew them both called her up and introduced the fighter on the telephone. After they were married she would not go to see him fight or listen to broadcasting of his bouts. Last month in Manhattan a bruised acquaintance accused the onetime heavyweight champion of slapping him down in a dispute over who should see a chorus-girl home. Asked in Hollywood whether this incident and their separation boded divorce, Mrs. Dempsey said, "No!"