Eisenstein's Monster

In 1930, Sergei Eisenstein, famed Russian cinema director, signed a contract with Paramount for $3,000 a week. Last week, from Manhattan, famed Sergei Eisenstein sailed back to Russia. It is customary for alien cinema artisans who have failed in Hollywood to speak bitterly of their sojourn there. Sergei Eisenstein did so:

"When Paramount asked me to come, I asked why. They said, 'We want something different.' I know now what that meant. ... On leaving a California cocktail party you say, 'Thank you so much, it was so "unusual." ' . . .

"I wanted to make Sutler's Gold. . They preached box-office to me ... Nice elderly ladies said Mrs. Sutter should be pictured as a nicer character. . . . And the Daughters of Something-or-Other got interested and raised a row. ... A Major Pease and his Blue Shirts said I was a 'Red Dog.' . . . And the producers complained that I didn't seem to get sex appeal. . . . And the race question entered into my difficulties, too, and I don't mean the Negro race. . . .

"Somehow, Slitter's Gold was dropped and it was decided that I should do Broken Lullaby. But they said, 'You mustn't shoot any dead bodies in the picture.' Then I tackled-Dreiser's An American Tragedy. . . . The script I made for it had Dreiser's approval. . . . Hollywood wanted just a police story, so I said, 'Why the hell pay Dreiser? Just get some clippings.'

"No, I didn't shoot one foot of film in Hollywood. ... My departure, after six months, was amicable. . . ."

On leaving Hollywood, Director Eisenstein. whose passport had expired, was given a ticket to Russia via Japan. He appealed to Reformer Upton Sinclair to get his passport extended, raise funds for him to make a picture in Mexico. In Mexico, he set about making a picture according to his own notions. As is his practice, he used natives instead of trained actors. He worked only on sunny days, drank beer on days when it rained? With no projection room in which to view "rushes" he used an immense amount of film--160.000 ft. The picture, not yet publicly released, is called Viva Mexico. It relates three incidents, each with different characters. Wrote Critic Edmund Wilson, after seeing parts of Viva Mexico: "The first is a tragedy of the Mexican peons under the Diaz regime; the second a romance of the master class during the same period and the third a story of one of the camp followers in the army of the revolution. ... As you watch . . . you are ready to believe that Eisenstein has indeed created the supreme masterpiece up-to-date of the movies." Director Eisenstein took his huge film of Viva Mexico with him last week to shape it for production in Moscow.

Sergei Eisenstein was born in Riga, son of a civil engineer, in 1898. When the Revolution started, he was 19. He enlisted in the engineering corps. After the War, he joined the Protecult, first Russian workers' theatre. His first assignment was Jack London's Mexicalia. In 1924 he completed his first cinema. Strike. Later, his pictures The Armored Cruiser Potemkin and Ten Days that Shook the World, photographically the most brilliant cinemas ever made, attracted the attention of Producer Jesse Lasky who gave fuzzy-haired, garrulous Director Eisenstein his Paramount contract, the world nothing.

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