The New Pictures

The Battle (Leon Garganoff) tells the story of a Japanese naval commander's burning devotion to his country. Adapted from Claude Farrere's novel La Bataitte, the tale involves a "neutral" British observer who has the run of a Japanese flagship, the Japanese commander's unhesitating use of his dutiful wife to get naval secrets his country needs, his final expiation of this dishonor. Aside from the extravagances of the plot, the pictorial treatment of The Battle is nearly perfect.

Far more important than the commander's personal tragedy are the remarkable battle sequences in the last reel, an international patchwork of action shots enterprisingly assembled and cleverly welded. Russian-born Leon Garganoff and some of his fellow emigres in Paris started an unpretentious photographic laboratory called Societe Anonyme Lianofilm, made enough profit to try a picture. Garganoff sent Nicholas Farkas, his crack cameraman, to Japan. Farkas made a close study of aristocratic Japanese interiors, got shots of harbors cluttered with boats, of Japanese street crowds. He claimed that he made films of naval maneuvers which were confiscated by the Japanese authorities. Upon Farkas' return to Paris, Garganoff borrowed a French warship, made action sequences in her gun turrets, on her decks, on her bridge, with Japanese actors impersonating Japanese sailors. To piece out the action U. S. newsreel shots of battle maneuvers, gunfire and torpedo practice were purchased from Fox.

As a final touch the Italian film of the St. Stephan's sinking (also to be seen currently in The First World War) was obtained. On June 11, 1918, the St. Stephan, flagship of the Austrian Navy, was attacked in the Adriatic by Italian torpedo boats. A torpedo found its mark and the St. Stephan began to list and sink with terrible rapidity. Frantic Austrian sailors are to be seen clambering up her steep deck and over onto her almost horizontal side. At that point the ship quivers convulsively, shakes many of them off into the water. Others manage to stay on the St. Stephan's upside-down hull as she turns completely over. Finally she and they go down together in a great swirl of water.

Good shots in The Battle's battle: white uniforms on the bridge flapping against a grey sky in what seems to be a mingled whine of wind and speeding turbines; the commander getting the enemy's range again & again in his finder, announcing it in a flat singsong; one gun turret after another reporting "Ready"; a lone survivor in one gun turret groping to the telephone for instructions; sailors, protected by masks and helmets, staggering about in fume-filled turrets, loading the guns (see cut, p. 44). The battle is bitter and bloody. When it is over and victory has been won, the commander retires to his quarters, dons the ceremonial robes for harakiri, slices his belly open. Another officer administers the coup de grace with a full two-handed sword stroke.

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Anitra's Dance (M. E. Bute) is five minutes of film in which appears no person, no utilitarian thing. It is an attempt to provoke emotion by the dramatic movements of abstract objects, accompanied by the music of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. In time to the music, a galaxy of rings swim into view, a pyramid intrudes, something resembling a piano keyboard rolls over & over, 50 balls pass deliberately across the screen. This unhuman cinema is, according to its author, the first entirely abstract film ever made and shown.

Author and producer is Mary Ellen Bute, daughter of a Texas landowner and second cousin of Woodrow Wilson's Colonel Edward Mandell House. After three years' work and 18 unproduced animated cartoons of abstract dramas, she hired a cameraman and made Anitra's Dance in three months for $3,000 in her Manhattan apartment. To get her abstract effects, she used sheets of crumpled Cellophane, an egg-cutter, prisms, toy pyramids, ping pong balls, velvet, sparklers, bracelets and, chiefly, camera angles. Although the pyramids are intended to suggest the fact that Anitra danced in the Egyptian desert, Miss Bute objects to symbolism, claims no connection with surrealism. Says she:

"This is just a kinetic visual art with time continuity. It takes advantage of the possibilities in the cinema of an abstract art that develops in time before the eyes as sound develops before the ears-rhythm, the development of themes in counterpoint, a variety of intensities and volumes. . . ."

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The Painted Veil (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). When Dr. Walter Fane (Herbert Marshall) goes to the door of his wife's bedroom in Hongkong, he finds it locked. On the hall table lies a polo helmet. From these two facts he knows that his Katrin (Greta Garbo) is sinning with a cool young legation attache (George Brent). At dinner that night, Dr. Fane presents Katrin with a choice: she will leave with him for Mei-tan-fu, where cholera is epidemic, or she will marry the attache.

At Mei-tan-fu Katrin has time to think about her misdemeanors. While Dr. Fane is busy treating cholera-stricken natives, she sits at home, listening to the babble of her Chinese maid who calls her "Missy" and a cockney resident named Waddington (Forrester Harvey). By the time the doctor has relented so far as to offer to send Katrin back to Hongkong, she has decided to stay in Mei-tan-fu as a nurse. Dr. Fane is wounded in a riot and at the same time the attache arrives in Mei-tan-fu to see how Katrin is making out. She gives him a short answer and hurries to her husband's sickbed, where they have a reconciliation.

If Mrs. Fane's relations with her husband had remained as they were when she first arrived in Hongkong, hers would have been a loveless and ignoble marriage. Since it is nothing of the sort at the conclusion of The Painted Veil, the picture, despite the fact that Censor Joseph Breen gave it Certificate of Approval No. 395, can be considered an advertisement for adultery as a matrimonial cureall. In this respect it follows Somerset Maugham's shallow novel, from which it was adapted. In other respects, except that it lacks the rapid-fire beginning in which the two lovers see the doorknob turn and wonder whether they have been discovered, The Painted Veil improves on its original.

In her first picture since Queen Christina, Greta Garbo gives a triumphant performance. As beautiful as ever but less numb than usual, she achieves the difficult feat of making Katrin seem more a human being than a fictionized heroine. Richard Boleslavski's direction is slow but sure; the picture gathers power steadily toward the finish. Its only thoroughly weak spot is a Chinese festival staged by Chester Hale to lend "production value"--a sequence which looks as if it had just finished an engagement at the Winter Garden. Good shot: Greta Garbo at dinner wondering how much her husband knows.

Jealousy (Columbia). To a familiar subject this picture adds only a few superficial footnotes. A prize-fighter (George Murphy) meditates dubiously the relation between his fiancee (Nancy Carroll) and her employer. After he marries her and goes broke, the doll-faced wife gets a new job from the old employer, whose identity she conceals from her husband. The prize-fighter discovers the two together just after they have been viewing samples of costume jewelry. In a scuffle the employer is killed. The prize-fighter wanders off in a daze while his wife is tried and convicted of murder. He returns in time to confess. How and why the prize-fighter escapes the electric chair, cinema audiences will understand only if they have seen the very beginning of Jealousy and waited patiently to the very last. Audiences who miss the whole thing will not be losers.

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College Rhythm (Paramount). Three years ago, a second-rate vaudeville comedian, worried by a cold audience in Birmingham, Ala., acted on an irrational inspiration. He rushed out of the wings, whined at the master of ceremonies: "Wanna buy a duck?"

That idiotic question was the beginning of one of vaudeville's characteristically fabulous success stories. Second-rate Comedian Joe Penner, born Joseph Pinta at Nadgybeck Kereck, Hungary, became almost immediately a first-rate comedian. He got a tour with Paramount Publix stage shows, a contract for 15 Warner Brothers shorts. In the course of the next two years, he had two more inspirations: 1) "You nasty man!" 2) "Don't never do that!" By 1933, all three had become household slogans. Because of his radio popularity, Joe Penner's weekly salary jumped from $500 to $7,500.

Before he became a vaudeville actor, Joe Penner had been a choir boy, magazine salesman, Ford filing clerk, property man for an act called "Rex the Mind Reader." He became an actor in 1923 when the comedian in the preceding skit deserted his show. Now married to a onetime chorus girl named Eleanor May Vogt, he has an Episcopal minister named Henry Scott Rubel write his songs. Nervous, shy and solemn in private life, he plays the violin, likes to make things with tools, hopes some day to be a dramatic writer.

Except that it is Joe Penner's first full-length cinema, College Rhythm differs little from dozens of predecessors about university life. In it Lyda Roberti, Helen Mack, Mary Brian dance and snuggle with Penner, Jack Oakie, Lanny Ross. A chorus jigs in & out of classrooms, in & about the counters of rival department stores where the male members of the cast are employed after graduation. Best songs, already popularized on the radio, are "Stay As Sweet As You Are," "Take a Number from One to Ten." An offstage character in his stage and radio performances, the Penner duck, Goo-goo, makes its debut in College Rhythm, paddles about in a pool while its owner sings.

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Imitation of Life (Universal). Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), a young widow with a small daughter, hires a colored cook (Louise Beavers), whose small daughter looks almost white. The two. mothers set up a boardwalk shop to sell pancakes. The two children grow up together. By the time the shop has become a corporation selling 32,000,000 boxes of Aunt Delilah's pancake flour every year, Bea Pullman is ready for romance with an ichthyologist (Warren William); small Jessie Pullman is old enough for an adolescent love affair with her mother's fiance; Aunt Delilah's daughter, Peola, is old enough to try to "pass" by taking a job as cashier in a restaurant.

The real heroine of Imitation of Life is not Bea Pullman but Aunt Delilah, and of the many problems which the picture investigates by far the most exciting is that of the aging colored woman whose good fortune emphasizes her daughter's racial unhappiness. By dodging this problem with dogged determination, Imitation of Life relinquishes all claim to artistic honesty. By introducing it at all, it diminishes the effect of incidents such as Bea Pullman's renunciation of her sweetheart to avoid hurting her daughter's feelings, Aunt Delilah's fumbling efforts to help Peola, and the comic complaints of Bea Pullman's business manager (Ned Sparks). Because of the authority with which it is acted and the skill with which Director John Stahl has built up individual episodes, the picture remains an efficient tearjerker, outspoken in its praise of motherlove. Good shot: Bea Pullman giving a tramp a meal in exchange for the advice that makes her fortune out of pancake flour.

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