The New Pictures

Back Street (Universal). Fannie Hurst's tender and moving biography of a kept woman is here reproduced in a sincere, detailed picture. Irene Dunne is the big-hearted daughter of a German notion-store keeper in Cincinnati. She falls in love with John Boles, a pedigreed young banker, who by a series of misunderstandings, makes her his mistress instead of his wife. Though Boles is selfish and niggardly, she rejects an old sweetheart who offers her position and wealth. The young banker becomes a big banker, supported by his mistress' advice. Going to Europe on a Reparations commission, he takes his mistress on one deck, his wife & children on another. One of the children attempts to pay off the mistress. Boles arrives in time to realize that her small linger is worth more to him than children, wife, fortune and career. He says: "She has taken only that part of me which none of you has seemed to want, or the existence of which you have even bothered about; and for it she has sacrificed everything that a woman has a right to believe is hers." Next day he has a paralytic stroke. He mutters his mistress' name into the telephone and dies. The chastened son offers to provide for her but she. aged with calamitous suddenness, dies too.

Back Street, novel and cinema, is based on the potent appeal of a character who humbly takes a prolonged beating from the world and the other characters. The situation of the heroine is socially, morally, economically and emotionally improbable, but genuinely affecting. Director John M. Stahl has elaborated the period detail of pre-War Cincinnati and Manhattan nearly as painstakingly as did Author Hurst. Examples: The high, ugly bandstand and the uniforms of the band playing Sousa's marches-on Sunday afternoon in Cincinnati; the three-step stoop before the notion store where the family chairs are drawn on summer evenings; the restfulness of the street noises--plodding hooves on cobbles, a teamster's gi-yap; pre-War Broad & Wall Streets, before the grey House of Morgan filled the corner.

White Zombie (United Artists) is the latest jitter & gooseflesh cinema. Dracula was the first of the current witches' Sabbath of horror pictures (TIME, Feb. 23, 1931), followed by Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue and Freaks. All have been box office successes.

White Zombie is based on Negro metaphysical practices in Haiti, which Author William B. Seabrook. credulous savage-lover, exploited in The Magic Island. Seabrook was enthusiastically noncommittal about the actual existence of ''zombies'' (animated dead men). The picture fervently believes in them. Dazed Madge Bellamy has come to Haiti to marry slack-jawed John Harron. Robert Frazer. her secret admirer, invites the two young people to his house to be married. To prevent the marriage he goes to a zombie tycoon. Bela Lugosi. who looks like a comic imbecile, can make his jawbones rigid and show-the whites of his eyes. These abilities qualify him to make strong men cower and women swoon. Bela's zombie factory is going full-blast. Corpses carry baskets, grind the mill, do the upstairs work. Bela Lugosi suggests to half-good, half-bad Robert Frazer that they turn Madge into a zombie. After moral convulsions, Frazer gives Madge Bellamy a rose on which is a drop of potent magic. After the wedding ceremony, Bela Lugosi cuts a woman's figure out of a wax candle, then melts it in a flame. Madge crumples too, is buried. Frazer and Bela Lugosi disinter and install her in a craggy castle where vultures scream and Bela Lugosi is served by a group of stalking zombies, enemies whom he has devitalized by black magic, interred, disinterred and enslaved. With expressions of frozen agony, like figures in a waxworks they shuffle woodenly about on Lugosi's horrid errands. Meanwhile John Harron has found a priest, Joseph Cawthorn, who knows about Haitian voodoo worship. Together they find the fabulous castle. They save Madge Bellamy, vanquish evil by the power of love, horse sense and blackjacks.

As the picture scrupulously explains, zombies are a superstition. But it adds that "wherever there is a superstition, you will find there is also a fact." Voodoo is still esoterically practiced in Haiti. The Penal Code, Article 249, reads: "If, after the administration of such substances [drugs to induce a coma-like death] the person has been buried, the act shall be considered murder, no matter what result follows." No scientist has investigated zombies. But reports indicate that the term means people who have died of disease, old age or wounds and. before decomposition, been reanimated. White Zombie combines voodoo murder prac tice and zombie resurrection, proposing that a zombie is a man who is still alive but whose soul and brain have been killed by remote hypnosis. Cinema zombies are oddly hypnotized men, more credible to cinemaddicts than true resurrected corpses, such as fabulously stalk the Haitian jungles.

The acting of everybody in White Zombie suggests that there may be some grounds for believing in zombies.

Bela Lugosi, son of Banker Baron Lugosi. was born in Lugos, Hungary, 49 years ago. He stands 6 ft. i in., has bulging blue eyes, was a famed actor in Budapest for ten years before the War. A sympathizer of Count Karolyi during the Revolution, he fled Hungary when the Royalists returned to power. In 1925 in Manhattan he learned the lines of a Spanish Apache in The Red Poppy, without knowing enough English to know what he was saying.

The Last Mile (World Wide) is a querulous picture of life in the deathhouse. John Wexley's play, based on a deathhouse convict's actual diary and news reports of several prison breaks, was angrily realistic. The cinema has omitted the anger and realism, added hope rays and a new plot.

Howard Phillips, innocent of crime, is brought into the deathhouse as an electrocution prospect. The other convicts, introverts all, reflect on life as they await their turns in the chair. As in the play, the cell lights flicker and dim when the current is turned into the chair. Phillips swoons, mentally recapitulates his conviction. Preston Foster is the tough convict who leads the move by which the convicts capture the guards, barricade themselves inside the deathhouse. Bargaining for their liberty they execute the guards one by one. Meanwhile, radio policemen outside are chasing a set of gangsters who are in a position to prove that Howard Phillips is innocent. The warden uses a convenient telephone to tell Preston Foster that his friend Phillips has been proved innocent, will be reprieved if they all surrender. Foster agrees for the sake of the picture's plot, walks out into the guards' hail of bullets. Most of the harsh ironies of the play, such as the scene between the "Killer"' and the prison chaplain, are omitted.

Typical scene: Foster refusing at first to surrender, "I wanna show the world that I don't like it. To show the world that 7 object to it. Do ya think that I wanna die? Ya think that I ain't a human being? Ya think I don't wanna live? Ya think it's nice to wait in that rotten cell, day after day. week after week, month after month, and see men die, one after another, see lights go dim. hear the whine of that motor, and wait and wait and wait, and die a million times every minute?"

Tom Brown of Culver (Universal) has nothing to do with the famed English story of school life, Tom Brown's School Days, by Thomas Hughes. Tom Brown of Culver is named for Boy Actor Tom Brown. It is a relatively plotless, episodic picture of life at Culver Military Academy in Indiana.

Tom Brown is a boy whose doctor father was given the Congressional Medal of Honor, reported dead. Tom is fighting in a boxing club's preliminaries when he is found by an officer of the American Legion which subsequently sends him to Culver in memory of his father. To Tom's friend Slim Summerville presently comes Tom's long-lost father (H. B. Warner). Shellshocked, he had deserted after exchanging identification tags with an arm he found on the battlefield. Slim brings father & son together, incognito. The father is about to kill himself, after seeing Tom at Culver. Tom saves him, learns who he is. Tom plans to leave Culver next year to stand by his disgraced father, when the Legion obtains for the latter an honorable discharge.

More relevant than the story are the scenes of Culver: the clumsy squad of plebes, inspections, the morning cannon and reveille, mealtime in the great dining hall, promotion and demotion, and finally graduation day, with its mingling of the military and the academic on Culver's beautiful campus.

Downstairs (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). When John Gilbert found that he had ceased to be a hero, he resolved to turn villain. The brilliance of his strategy is plain in this picture, which he wrote himself, sold for $1. The story is laid in a castle outside Vienna, seen from the perspective of the servants' hall. Gilbert is a new chauffeur with a monkey's flair for mischief. Plausible, playful, roving-eyed, he spreads ruin and rage around him.

To the castle on the wedding day of Head Butler Paul Lukas and the Baroness' personal maid Virginia Bruce, comes John Gilbert, highly recommended by the apprehensive countess whose chauffeur he has been. He watches the butler take his bride to his room. The upstairs buzzer sounds. Says the butler: "Don't worry, my darling Anna. My father was a butler, and he had nine children." As he leaves John Gilbert quickly and smoothly appears. He tells a sentimental story of his-- mother's wedding night. Presently he is also fast friends with the butler and with the cook to whom he has told a plaintive story of his mother's lack of a wedding night. Driving the Baroness (Olga Baclanova) he wins her confidence too. He gives the maid, Virginia Bruce, a diamond clasp stolen from the Baroness. He answers the Baroness' charges by saying he got it at an address which happens to be that of her lover. He gets the maid drunk on a party financed by the cook's life-savings. Next morning the maid, unrepentant, tells her husband: "Why didn't you show me love was like that?" John Gilbert keeps all the balls of his intrigues in the air at once, climaxing villainy with villainy. He has persuaded the maid to run away with him, when she discovers his blackmail enterprises. He beats her up. Finally, by virtue of a unanimous convulsion of outrage, upstairs & downstairs, he is booted out of the castle. Striking is the audience's mounting pleasure as the busy chauffeur piles outrage on dirty trick.

The marriage of John Gilbert and his rew leading lady, Virginia Bruce, is called imminent. Says he: "God was a lamb when he gave me Virginia." He enrages the technical sound men by taking everywhere a small noisy dachshund, saying the dog is "in my hair." Observers last week thought Downstairs had brought Gilbert back to the top of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's stable of stars.

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