The New Pictures

Our Daily Bread (Viking). For the average Hollywood producer, Depression furnished a number of tedious gags, a few new turns for old plots. But it failed to invest the cinema with much New Deal sentiment, much sense of economic ferment. This fact has long rankled in the impatient mind of thick-lipped, shock-haired King Vidor.

More than two years ago Director Vidor read an article on subsistence farming by Professor Malcolm McDermott of Duke University. What he felt about subsistence farming seemed too radical for the producers to whom Vidor offered his ideas. Besides, they believed the subject would be outdated before it reached the public. But Vidor's friends told him to go ahead and for a year Vidor hired a girl to do nothing but clip newspapers. Convinced that the common people were as interested in his theme as he was, he produced Our Daily Bread. Of it he says: "Not only is my heart in the picture, but my shirt as well."

Director Vidor picked up his extras from the unemployed on Los Angeles streets, chose a dirt farm for his location where for two months he drew blue prints of each day's shooting. Result is a well-paced, high-pitched picture which, though it strikes no alarming political note, should help King Vidor keep his shirt.

To a dilapidated mortgaged farm lent them by an uncle go unemployed John Sims (Tom Keene) and his wife Mary (Karen Morley). Living on sardines and hacking forlornly at the soil with a spade, they are happy to take in a passerby and his family who have been dispossessed. John puts up signs inviting other jobless to join their community--a carpenter, a stone mason, a barber, a violinist, a tailor, an undertaker, an escaped convict. They build shacks, plough the fields using manpower, a motorcycle, decrepit automobiles. When they first behold a seedling they exhibit naive joy and the carpenter leads them in prayer. But before their crops are ready for harvest their larder is depleted. The convict saves the community by arranging for one of them to get a $500 reward for his apprehension. Then comes Drought. Gloomily John is about to go off with a wench who has joined the group, when he hears a sound which he knows means the mountain stream is filling.

Well cast and well photographed, Our Daily Bread is emotional rather than factual, directed by Vidor with a frequent eye to such devices as a shot of Mary knitting to show goodness, a shot of the wench playing a blues tune to show badness. Best sequence is the final one, done in the Russian manner. In it the community works furiously against time to dig an irrigation ditch from the river to their fields. Of this Director Vidor says: "I tried to develop it like a ballet. I aimed to get the effect of mounting drama through the movements of the diggers' bodies. With the use of a metronome whose tempo was kept constantly on the increase, I set my actors to work with their picks and shovels. I believe I have gotten what I wanted."

Caravan (Fox). Charles Boyer, who is to the French cinema what Maurice Chevalier was to French vaudeville, makes his U. S. debut in this operetta about gypsies. Erik Charrell (Congress Dances) was imported to direct. Werner Richard Heymann composed the music and a top-notch Hollywood cast--Loretta Young, Jean Parker, Dudley Digges, C. Aubrey Smith and Phillips Holmes--were assembled to act in a story written by a real Hungarian, Melchior Lengyel. Despite these elaborate preliminaries Caravan remains just another gypsy operetta.

Loretta Young, as the countess on whose estate the gypsies are hired to supply music for a wine festival, marries a violinist (Boyer) to comply with an irregular codicil in her father's will. It soon develops that she loves not the violinist who has deserted his gypsy sweetheart (Parker) but a dashing young lieutenant (Holmes). When she tries to buy the fiddler off, it gives Boyer a chance to declaim: "I may be a poor gypsy but my heart is not for sale." The picture, which might well have ended at this point, goes on to show how the two pairs of lovers are tardily reunited. Best things in the picture are Composer Heymann's songs: "Happy, I Am Happy," "Wine Song," "Ha-Cha-Cha."

The Pursuit of Happiness (Paramount). George Raft turned down the lead in this picture, taken from last season's Broadway success, because he objected on principle to the practice of "bundling." In Colonial times "bundling" meant going to bed fully dressed with one's sweetheart, prior to matrimony, for the combined purpose of speeding the courtship and saving firewood. U. S. audiences probably missed little by Raft's priggishness, for Francis Lederer, who was rushed in to "bundle" for him, does very well. As a Hessian who deserts the mercenaries sent against Washington and turns up milking a cow in Joan Bennett's barn, he has a good chance to display his talent for love scenes.

The Connecticut town in which the action occurs is, at the moment, hardly more hostile to Hessians than to "bundling." When Lederer is discovered, by an anti-bundling clergyman and by his rival for Miss Bennett's hand, "bundling" with her in her own house, only the intervention of a Revolutionary colonel saves him from an awful fate. Although the effect of Puritan love rituals on modern sensibilities cannot be settled until the box-office score is counted, The Pursuit of Happiness screens a gay and engaging cross-stitch pattern of a period which the cinema has ignored too long. Good shot: Colonial militiamen bowling in the lamplight while their prisoner escapes down the back stairs.

In The Age of Innocence (RKO) the heartaches which have afflicted John Boles and Irene Dunne in their previous pictures have a new setting--New York in the 1880s. New, too, is a flavor contributed partly by Edith Wharton's plot and partly by the Hollywood age of innocence which began last summer when Joseph Breen became the industry's censor.

When Newland Archer (Boles) meets Countess Olenska (Dunne) at a reception given to announce his engagement to her cousin May Welland, he falls in love with her. But his sense of duty checks his impulse to act accordingly and a series of painful coincidences complete a situation that sends the Countess back to Europe, condemns Archer to matrimonial martyrdom. The qualities that lift The Age of Innocence out of the class of its tear-jerking predecessors are easy to detect but difficult to define. The atmosphere of the picture proper (there is a needless prolog and epilog) is superbly sustained. Brought to Hollywood from Manhattan's Theatre Guild, Director Philip Moeller was successful in teaching Irene Dunne some of Lynn Fontanne's tricks of speech and manner. Also present from the Theatre Guild is its famed character actress, Helen Westley, who plays Grandmother Mingott.

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