The New Pictures

Song of the Flame (First National). Technicolor, elaborate staging, good Gershwin tunes and 5,000 voices have been assembled in this reproduction of a Broadway operetta. Bernice Claire is supposed to be a sort of Russian Joan of Arc; you are led to believe that the theme song she sings brings about the Revolution. It is extravagantly unreal, entirely out of the tradition of naturalistic cinema. Audiences who like operetta and audiences in the country who have never had much chance to decide whether they like it or not may find Song of the Flame to their taste. Others may prefer to wait until the songs get on the radio. Best shot: Noah Beery singing "One Little Drink" in a basso billed as "two notes lower than any ever recorded."

Show Girl in Hollywood (First National). The adventures of Joseph Patrick McEvoy's laboriously vivacious heroine are continued in a sequel to Show Girl which is rather duller than its predecessor. Alice White's saucy face and impish dancing tide over long sequences of shoptalk garnished with heavy-handed wit. Best role: Blanche Sweet as a fading beauty of the screen who sings a song to the effect that "there is a tear for every smile in Hollywood."

Old and New (Amkino). To Manhattan last week came Producer Jesse L. Lasky and Director Sergie Michailovitch Eisenstein aboard the Enropa. In Director Eisenstein's pocket was a contract with Paramount-Famous-Lasky Corp. to direct their pictures, use his original art--an art of faces. Instead of finding an actor whose physical equipment, intelligence and training fit him to play a given part, Eisenstein looks for a human being who will be the part, whose performance in front of the camera will not be acting but a continuation of the life which that person lives daily. It is a method which may meet difficulties in Hollywood where, in an actor-population, every successful "type" is inevitably an actor-type; but it is practical in a story like Old and New, dealing with an outstanding phase of Russian life, and taken on location.

Old and New shows the peasants of the steppes first resisting, finally adopting modern agricultural methods in their work. Like all contemporary Russian cinemas, it is dishonest. The victory is won too easily; better times break out like sunlight at the touch of Soviet educators, while the real, secret, breath-taking drama now going on in Russia--the test of a government which has by no means proved its ability to keep faith with its policies--is suppressed. But Old and New is interesting in spite of what it leaves out. It is wonderfully photographed in the flat, wheat-colored daylight of the steppes. Into a poverty in which peasants sleep with roaches running across their faces, and chop their houses in half when a family splits up, and plough, lacking a horse or an ox, with a cow in the traces, the Commune brings mowing machinery and a cream separator. Bold rustic humor finds rich material in the wedding of Fomka, the communal bull, for which the whole village turns out in Sunday clothes. Gathered in front of a barn gate, waiting the entry of Fomka's flower-wreathed bride, the crowd repeats "here she comes" but the first creature to come through the gate is a baby, the second a kitten, finally the bride, to the stirring strains of the "Internationale." Best shot: priests, farmers, woman, and cripples, marching with ikons and incense through the scorched fields, asking God for rain.

Redemption (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This is an ambitious version of Tolstoy's play about a man who redeemed himself spiritually by sacrificing everything, even life, to his inability to make decisions. Its intention is less to popularize Tolstoy than to strengthen the prestige of Actor John Gilbert, whose first talking picture, His Glorious Night, was a failure. Gilbert declaims Fedya in a resonant, hollow voice, giving in his best scenes a lively imitation of John Barrymore and in his worst a caricature of himself in those pictures in which he made his reputation as the Screen's Greatest Lover. The photography and recording are good, but not the adaptation : Redemption might have been told with more continuity if less time had been wasted on photographic atmosphere. Typical shot: Gilbert jumping up against a garden wall in the moonlight to caress the hand of the heroine.

The Devil's Holiday (Paramount). Director Edmund Goulding usually writes his own stories and has the reputation of being able to make the stars who work for him perform brilliantly even when they have given no previous indication of brilliance. After bossing Gloria Swanson in her most recent and best picture The Trespasser, he has done an even more painstaking job for Nancy Carroll, whose previous film experience has embraced few parts more taxing than the leads in Honey and Sweetie. In The Demi's Holiday she plays a little adventuress who, in cahoots with a salesman of farm equipment, sets about fascinating the respectable son of a rich farming family. From the Chicago hotel where their meeting takes place, the story moves west to a shadowy, oldfashioned mansion on the farm lands, showing how marriage works out for the demimondaine and the rich boy whom she has married partly to get even with his brother, who tried to buy her off, and partly for the money. Goulding's dialog has shopworn stretches, but much of it is convincing and subtle. He has varied cinematic formulas enough to make The Devil's Holiday artistically effective, but not enough to impair its popular appeal. It remains a program picture, but a far better one than the average. Best shot: Nancy Carroll's thoughts about her husband revealed to the audience by a slip of the tongue when she is back in a Chicago hotel room trying to get drunk on champagne.

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