The New Pictures

The Cry of the World (International Film Foundation) is an intelligent and heterogeneous compilation of newsreel shots on such matters as the War, Prohibition, U. S. Crime, Disarmament Conferences, Gandhi, Mussolini, Hoover. Hitler, the Japanese at Shanghai. Its grandiose title is meaningless and misleading. The picture is improved by its lack of a theme; the pleasure of watching it is analogous to that of reading the headlines of old newspapers. Good shots: Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. looking out of his window; Mahatma Gandhi with one finger on his nose; Mrs. Charles H. Sabin denouncing Prohibition; Manhattan police riding their horses into a crowd of Communists; an old scared Chinaman stooping to retrieve his bundle from a Shanghai gutter; Congressman La Guardia delivering an oration on a bunch of grapes.

Formation of the International Film Foundation--non-profit-making producer and distributor of educational films--was announced last fortnight in Manhattan. President of I. F. F. is President Wallace Walter Atwood of Clark University. Purpose of I. F. F. is to centralize production and distribution of educational films. It will manufacture three types: classroom films, noncurriculum films for auditorium use, a few special films, like The Cry of the World, for general distribution. Most of the personnel of I. F. F., including President Atwood, were previously connected with the visual education department of Fox which, after spending $300,000 on educational films in the last two years, has ceased to function.

The World and the Flesh (Paramount) is a melodrama of the Russian revolution, replete with sardonic guffaws by George Bancroft and disdainful cigaret puffings by Alan Mowbray. Bancroft is a Bolshevik sea-captain named Kylenko. Mowbray is a calm patrician. His name is Dmitri and he uses his monocle in such debonair fashion that you are sure he will be executed before the picture ends. There is also a dancing girl (Miriam Hopkins) who is Dmitri's mistress. With her he runs away from the Bolsheviks. When they | reach the seaport of Theodosia, Dmitri thinks that he is safe. He and some of his aristocratic companions are giving a soiree when the town is captured by Kylenko.

Now things really begin to happen. The town is recaptured by the Tsar's army. Kylenko and his underlings are put aboard ship for Sebastopol, to be executed. They capture the ship and head it back for Theodosia which has been recaptured by Reds. The aristocrats on board, aided by the dancing girl, try to magnetize the ship's compass so that they can steer for Sebastopol without letting Kylenko find out about it. For a time the boat is practically spinning in the Black Sea; but when it docks its passengers find themselves at Theodosia. Dmitri is taken off, still smoking, to face a firing squad. The dancing girl, a peasant at heart, attaches herself to Kylenko.

The World and the Flesh treats the Russian revolution in a new manner for the cinema, using it as the material for blood & thunder romance in the style of Rafael Sabatini. It is a well directed and adequately authentic picture, damaged mainly by prolixity of plot and by reverberations of George Bancroft's guffaw. His laughter is of a sort to suggest that he has just heard a joke which he does not understand.

The Woman in Room 13 (Fox). While Elissa Landi was finishing a novel and making Devil's Lottery (TIME, April 11), Ralph Bellamy made two unimportant pictures in which he took the parts of a police captain (Disorderly Conduct) and a juvenile court judge (Young America). In The Woman in Room 73 Bellamy almost becomes mayor. He never does because his wife (Miss Landi) selects campaign time to divorce him. That much is plausible--Miss Landi had good cause to divorce her husband. But then the picture turns into a dictaphone drama, with no trappings omitted. In a spirit of revenge Bellamy, now head of a detective agency, sets out to prove that Miss Landi, after a happy second marriage, is carrying on an affair with a concert singer. He thinks he has accomplished his end when he has Husband No. 2 (Neil Hamilton) jailed, falsely accused of murdering the singer. But the Woman in Room 13 spoils his fun. Garnished with a courtroom scene and many a salty tear. Miss Landi's latest cinema venture makes you think her time on location would have been spent to better advantage had she used it to start another novel.

The Strange Love of Molly Louvain

(First National). Lee Tracy is an actor who can always seem chipper and spontaneous. He does so in this picture despite the handicap of having to recite gags as old as the one about putting all his bills in the wastebasket and paying the first one he draws out. Aside from his performance, there is very little that is strange about The Strange Love of Molly Louvain except that it is written with a relish for cliche which makes the few episodes which are genuine seem absurd. Thus Molly Louvain (Ann Dvorak), a cigar counter girl in a small town hotel, is deserted by a rich seducer before the picture is five minutes old. Admired by an ingenious bellhop (Richard Cromwell), she takes up with a slick stocking salesman (Leslie Fenton) who turns out to be a crook. After an interval in which she gives birth to her seducer's child, she re-encounters the bellhop. Together they are involved in a crime committed by the crook. By this time, you are likely to be confused by Lee Tracy's entrance into the proceedings. He is a chatty reporter with casual mannerisms. At first he uses unscrupulous means to learn the whereabouts of Molly Louvain, since she is wanted for murder. He does not know that she is a next door neighbor in his rooming house. When he finds it out, he regrets his activities and plans to marry her. Typical shot: Molly, disappointed by the disappearance of her first lover, making merry with the stocking salesman who replies "Atta Baby!" when she cries "Boop boop!''

The Strange Case of Clara Deane

(Paramount) would seem more strange if it were less similar to the strange cases of Madelon Claudet and Madame X. This time it is Wynne Gibson--a versatile actress hitherto given to gay or dipsomaniac impersonations--who marries a rogue (Pat O'Brien), goes to jail for his knaveries and emerges after 15 years hoping to find out what has become of her small daughter. She secures a job with a modiste and is assigned to alter a wedding dress. Cinemaddicts will not be surprised to learn that the dress is for the daughter (Frances Dee). The wages of virtue in the cinema are seldom high. In this case they touch a new low. The woman's husband reappears, tries to blackmail the daughter. Wynne Gibson is therefore compelled to shoot him. Having done so she faces the prospect of a lonely and miserable senescence. The best quality in The Strange Case of Clara Deane is a disarming unpretentiousness of writing and direction. Actresses who play unhappy mothers usually do it well. Wynne Gibson is inferior to Helen Hayes (Madelon Claudet) but better than Ruth Chatterton (Madame X). She is ably badgered by Mr. O'Brien and Dudley Digges, as a detective who adopts her child. Typical shot: Wynne Gibson being separated from her child by prison matrons.

Thunder Below (Paramount). As the wife of a Central American geologist (Charles Bickford) who learns that he is going blind, Tallulah Bankhead has very little to do in this picture except sit around and talk. But her talk is supposed to register emotional starvation and it does so. She makes you feel why she would like to run off with the geologist's best friend (Paul Lukas) and why, instead, she goes away with a young engineer. When Lukas brings her back to her husband, Miss Bankhead has to put life into a melodramatic conclusion. She throws herself off a balcony into the rocky surf, leaving her husband and his friend to make what they can of their relationship. Thunder Below is indubitably Tallulah Bankhead's best picture. She helped adapt it, from Thomas Rourke's novel, and she gives a performance in it which justifies her own contempt for her earlier and inferior productions.

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