The New Pictures

Mata Hari (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). One of the legends about Mata Hari, a Parisian cabaret dancer who was executed for espionage during the War, says that she was unable to break herself of the habit of taking off her clothes at crucial moments and was therefore naked when she faced a French firing squad. This episode is omitted from the Greta Garbo version of the affair, which ends as Miss Garbo, majestic in black, is walking down a long corridor between two lines of soldiers. Her lover (Ramon Novarro) is a blind aviator who has said good-by to her under the impression that her prison is a hospital and that she is leaving him to undergo a minor operation. To reveal its tragic conclusion in no way impairs the effectiveness of this sombre and spectacular fiction. Greta Garbo is to many the supreme tragedienne of the cinema and the picture is a darkly theatrical hyperbole, intent on glorification rather than illusion.

It begins with Greta Garbo dancing, very badly indeed, in leggings and some thing that looks like a pillow on her wiggling rear. The young aviator who has flown to Paris with despatches from Russia sees her, meets her, spends a late evening in her company. The next night he is ordered to return to Russia but by this time Mata Hari finds it expedient to steal some papers from him. To do so, she passes small hours at his quarters, makes him blow out a holy candle burning under the ikon of a madonna. The aviator finally starts back for Russia, but his plane crashes. Miss Garbo, like all female spies in the cinema, sacrifices professional curiosity to I'amour. She kills a Russian general (Lionel Barrymore), but not until jealousy has made him give the information which leads to her painful but ennobled end.

Great actresses, almost by definition, appear in vehicles which are focused on glamour rather than on truth. Mata Hari, brilliantly acted and directed, is no exception. Garbo. in the opinion of her admirers, is the Hollywood Duse, not far inferior to the tragic Eleonora. In this picture her Swedish voice, her awning lashes, her curt gestures are somehow becoming to the abridged and euphemistic story of a Javanese dancer whose real name, according to the best authorities, was Margaret Zelle MacLeod. Good shot: two lighted cigarets in a pitch black room, where Garbo and Novarro are talking.

Ladies of the Big House (Paramount). Almost every program picture contains at least one new idea. In this one the idea is a jail break by women, executed in rough & ready fashion. One prisoner secretes a pair of wire clippers under her pillow. The heroine (Sylvia Sidney) helps her snip at a fence which separates the prison yard from a bay. The jailbreak fails, but since Sylvia Sidney is unjustly imprisoned she gets out before the picture ends. The plot framework which surrounds the prison scenes is diverting and well constructed, but basically improbable. It has to do with a gangster who pays attention to Miss Sidney, gets rid of his old girl by sending her to jail, vengefully shoots a detective because Miss Sidney marries someone else. She and her husband (Gene Raymond) are convicted of the shooting on circumstantial evidence. The gangster's old girl meets Miss Sidney in jail and tries to help her save her husband from the gallows. Ladies of the Big House was written by Ernest Booth, a Folsom convict serving a life term. It is well acted, well directed by Marion Gering, and highly charged with spurious excitement. Best shot: Sylvia Sidney and Gene Raymond allowed to see each other for a moment in the jail, so that a news-photographer can snap their hysterical embrace.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Paramount) presents for actors the fascinating problem of how to change from the sleek and handsome Dr. Jekyll into the menacing and ugly Mr. Hyde. This problem John Barrymore solved in the silent version by rubbing his face with one hand and writhing. Fredric March takes advantage of the camera and makes the transitions less of a tour de force. The face of the handsome young British sawbones becomes by barely perceptible degrees of trick photography the visage of a sabre-toothed baboon with pig eyes and a tassel of primeval hair. The story--most macabre product of the queer brain of Robert Louis Stevenson, sometimes politely sentimental, sometimes insanely, savagely gloomy-- goes much as usual, with Hollywood variations. Mr. Hyde pursues a music hall girl (Miriam Hopkins) and brutally mistreats her while Dr. Jekyll makes intermittent and respectable love to the daughter (Rose Hobart) of a bigwig. Dr. Jekyll promises the music hall girl immunity from Mr. Hyde, then finds he can no longer regulate his horrid transformations. As Mr. Hyde, he goes to the trollop's rooms and kills her. Mr. Hyde has tried clubbing the father of Dr. Jekyll's fiancee and embracing the girl herself before the picture ends with a shot of a corpse in Dr. Jekyll's laboratory.

Director Rouben Mamoulian added to the story a few Freudian touches. He made Hyde an incarnation of primitive sadism rather than a London bogeyman who was bad without good reason. Fredric March, ably assisted by Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart, is magnificent as Hyde, and he gives Jekyll a stilted Victorian elegance which, being a little false, makes Hyde's existence seem more credible. Good shot: Jekyll turning into Hyde as he watches a cat stalk a sparrow.

The Woman from Monte Carlo (Warner), contrived as a vehicle for the U. S. debut of German Lil Dagover, is a jerky little melodrama of continental intrigue and the War. A lady married to a captain in the French navy finds herself aboard her husband's ship and in a cabin which belongs to one of his subordinates. Before her husband discovers her predicament, the ship is torpedoed and lost with all hands, except those essential to the foolish sequences with which the picture ends. In these, the lady's husband is court-martialed. His wife, by confessing her evening in the cabin, secures a pardon for him but compromises herself so that her husband will have no more to do with her. The Woman from Monte Carlo has a few good shots--notably one of the enemy ship's searchlight flashing on the wall of the stateroom in which the lady is sequestered--but it is otherwise slim pickings. Aided by Walter Huston, in a mustache, as the captain, and Warren William, as an admirer, Lil Dagover is distressed by circumstances of plot and dialog like those which have hampered other recent debuts of imported stars. She tries hard but all her part gives her a chance to show is a strong facial resemblance to Lynn Fontanne and a willingness to do better next time.

Born Lilith Witt, in Madiun, Java. Lil Dagover was educated, by European schools and tutors, out of her original ambition to marry a pastry cook. One of Germany's four most celebrated cinemactresses, she is 5 ft. 6 in., 103 lb., single.

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