The New Pictures

Pagliacci (Audio-Cinema Inc. & Fortune Gallo). Unkind people have said that Fortune Gallo does not like music much. He is a lively and busy executive, a bank director, concert manager, and, primarily, president and treasurer of the San Carlo Opera Company. Once when he was running an opera company in California he suggested to Composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who was working for him as a conductor, that Pagliacci would make a good movie. Leoncavallo refused to allow his masterpiece to be photographed unless the music went with it, but Gallo did not drop the idea. Last week, with characteristic enterprise, he presented Pagliacci, in Italian, without color, made by his San Carlo singers and backed by his own funds: the cinema's first full-length grand opera.

Opera has often come to film-seers in little pieces. One of the first things Warner Bros, did with the sound device was to make a series of short features in which famous stars sang arias. The experiment was not continued. Had Gallo's Pagliacci been made with singers from the Metropolitan their names might have been enough to put it over in fair-sized cities, but the cast means little as a draw nor is it overskillful. The singers act only when they feel their voices going back on them. This deficiency is startlingly revealed by closeups; there are times when the singers have the air of comics burlesquing grand opera stars. Their voices are not bad but they sing as loud as they can all the time and the recording makes the results even worse. The orchestra utters metallic clickings, moans sepulchrally in the lower register, makes the upper notes shrill and hollow.

Making Pagliacci will not rank with the past feats of Maestro Gallo, who once said of Pavlova "I bought her outright," and who persuaded the deposed Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii to go to one of his shows though she had not been out of her palace for 22 years. However, it is a courageous piece of pioneering and reveals a fact many producers had guessed but none had proved: grand opera is never likely to be successful cinema.

Rango (Paramount). Once more a good job has been done with jungle life. This time the scene is Sumatra and the photography by Ernest Schoedsack, who helped to make Chang. Though it is nontalking except for occasional voices explaining the action, Rango is not a travelog but has a proper scenario. An old Sumatran hunter and his son have gone into the interior to rid the country of tigers. The struggle of these two humans against the jungle is a parallel of the struggle of an orangutan and its child, and this parallel contributes the story. The orangutan is remarkable because it is so similar to man, and in this picture the relationship is derogatory to neither branch of the species: the hunter and the ape are allies against death-by-violence as symbolized by the tiger. Once the orangutans loot the hunter's hut but for the most part they are mannerly, sagacious, and amusing. With them in the cast are all sorts of other monkeys; they swarm across rivers, run up vines, keep a lookout in a tree and in the end are a deciding factor in the triumphant campaign against the tigers. Rango is intelligently thought out and beautifully photographed--a scientific document and a work of art at the same time, far more valuable though less exciting than the graphic Trader Horn. Best shot: a long battle between a tiger and a water buffalo, in which the buffalo stabs the tiger to death with its pointed horns. A shot that makes women scream and strong men close their eyes: the tiger killing the baby orangutan.

East Lynne (Fox). Mrs. Henry Wood wrote East Lynne in 1861. For 20 years after that it was regarded as a supreme creation. Now someone in the Fox script department has detected that East Lynne is more than a dramatic critic's joke. An old admirer of lovely Lady Isabel causes all her trouble when he takes her, unchaperoned, to a dance, and later goes to her bedroom to tell her of his love. East Lynne is not worth the talent that has gone into it (Clive Brook, Ann Harding, and Conrad Nagel form the triangle, and Joseph Urban designed the settings), but it is an honorable Victorian relic. Silliest sequences: the end in which Ann Harding, about to go blind, goes home for a last look at her child before walking over a cliff.

Comrades of 1918 (Nero). Although the German sound equipment for recording battle-noises is so inadequate that the scream of shells has little relationship to their explosions and machine gun fire resembles the noises made by cabaret rattles, this is one of the best directed and most gruesome of War pictures. High credit should go to Director G. W. Pabst who with small resources made a picture that in every technical respect except sound can compete with the best Hollywood product. U. S. spectators can understand it in spite of the German dialog, for the action of trench-warfare is pantomimic enough to be self-explanatory; they will find in it the nervous impact of unbearable physical horror. Comrades of 1918 is an argument against war and it points its theme less editorially than All Quiet on the Western Front, which may be. why the German nationalists did not ban it for home consumption as they did Carl Laemmle's picture. The framework is the friendship of four German soldiers and their varying fates. Best sequences: the soldier who goes home to find that his wife has deceived him with the butcher's helper.

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