The New Pictures

Silver Dollar (Warner). In Denver, Colo., where a theatre and a telephone exchange are named for him, Horace Austin Warner Tabor is well remembered. "Haw" Tabor was born in 1830. He grew up in Vermont, went to work for and married the shrewish daughter of a Maine stonecutter. Heading West, young Tabor and his wife farmed in Kansas for a few years, then pushed on to prospect for gold in Colorado. Haw Tabor took to running a general store. In return for $64 worth of supplies, two German silver-diggers gave him a one-third interest in anything they found. His share turned out to be worth more than $1,000,000. Tabor acquired a better mine from a swindler who, thinking his land worthless, had sprinkled silver on top of it without bothering to look beneath the surface. Equipped with fabulous wealth, Tabor gave Denver a munificent opera house with his name engraved on a two-foot block of silver. He got himself elected lieutenant governor, divorced his wife, Augusta, to marry a mining camp belle named Baby Doe. President Arthur attended the wedding, in Washington, just after Haw Tabor had wangled himself a seat in the U. S. Senate. Tabor spent $1,000 on a silk and lace nightshirt with gold buttons; he was swindled out of a fortune trying to buy as a present for his wife the jewels which legend says Queen Isabella pawned to finance Christopher Columbus; for great occasions he sprinkled gold dust on his carriage horses. William Jennings Bryan, when he saw Tabor's daughter, said her laugh had the ring of a silver dollar. Tabor had her christened Rosemary Silver Dollar Echo Honeymoon Tabor. When the campaign for free silver failed, Tabor was ruined. President McKinley made him postmaster of Denver in 1898. A year later Tabor died, after advising his wife never to let go his last silver mine, the Matchless.

The only thing that Warner Brothers had to fear in making a picture about Haw Tabor was that the facts of 'his life, as reported in Author David Karsner's book Silver Dollar, would seem too theatrical. This danger was averted in a skillful continuity by Carl Erickson and Harvey Thew and in an amazingly successful impersonation of Haw Tabor (called Yates Martin in the picture) by Edward G. Robinson. Robinson makes Yates Martin what Haw Tabor very likely was--a gay, growling, vain man, dazzled and delighted by a world which, for a time, seemed made of silver. Aline MacMahon is Yates Martin's first wife; Bebe Daniels is his second. They help Actor Robinson make Silver Dollar a vivid and perceptive cinema biography in which the weakest moment is one of the truest to fact: Yates Martin strolling into his Denver Opera House when there is no one there, suffering the heart attack that causes his death.

Warner Brothers exploited Silver Dollar cleverly. Before the picture was nationally released last week, they distributed 12,000 silver dollars in change to patrons who bought tickets at the Strand Theatre in Manhattan. To a special opening in Den ver three weeks ago (in the Denver Theatre, near the Tabor Grand Opera House which is now a cinema theatre) so many notables were invited that the premiere was Denver's most brilliant since the Tabor Grand Opera House opened its dcrors in 1881 with Maritana. Among the notables who failed to attend the

Denver opening of Silver Dollar was Baby Doe, now a recluse who lives near Denver in a shack built at the entrance of the disused Matchless Mine. Grown eccentric in her dotage, she threatens to shoot visitors with a shotgun, wears remnants of the dresses she wore in Washington when Haw Tabor seemed to be the richest man in the world. She still believes that her daughter, Silver Dollar Tabor--who died, under an assumed name, in a Chicago brothel in 1925--is alive in a convent.

Madame Butterfly (Paramount). Because Sylvia Sidney has almond-shaped eyes it was inevitable that one day she would be given a kimono and a mop of black hair on top of her head, taught to walk with mincing steps, compelled to use the adjective "velly" in a squeaky treble. She does it all as prettily as could be expected in Madame Butterfly, expensively handled as an individual production by Paramount's onetime production chief, Benjamin Percival Schulberg.

The story--about a U. S. naval officer (Gary Grant) who light-heartedly marries a geisha girl, deserts her when she is with child, returns with his U. S. wife to pay a call when the geisha girl has been hungrily awaiting his return for three years--seems a little forlorn with no one to sing Puccini's music. For cinemaddicts who enjoy librettos without song it should provide acceptable entertainment. Typical shot: Gary Grant heartily promising to return to Japan when the robins nest again.

Rasputin and the Empress (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The most exciting sequence in this picture is the one which shows Prince Chegodieff (John Barrymore) murdering Rasputin (Lionel Barry-more). The murder occurs in the cellar of the Chegodieff palace where the Prince, secreted in the pantry, has been feeding Rasputin poisoned cakes and where Rasputin--under the impression that he is at the home of a friend--has been gobbling them with relish, while pawing at a group of pretty female companions. When Rasputin finds out at whose house he has been holding his lecherous revels, he takes Chegodieff downstairs and begins to shoot at him with a revolver. He has just fired the first shot when the poison begins to act. Chegodieff, anxious to hurry matters along, tries to push Rasputin into the fire. When this fails, he wrestles with him, whacks him across the nose with a poker. Rasputin writhes on the floor. Chegodieff then seizes an immense fire iron resembling a crowbar and mashes Rasputin as though he were a potato. He is just congratulating himself on having despatched his antagonist when Rasputin stands up. His face is an indescribable pulp, spattered with blood and sticky morsels which appear to be brains; nonetheless, he manages to give a Barrymore grunt. Chegodieff takes Rasputin out into the snow, pushes his gory head into a river.

That is the horrid end of Rasputin but not the end of horridness in Rasputin and the Empress. It goes on to show Tsar Nicholas (Ralph Morgan), the Tsarina (Ethel Barrymore), the Tsarevitch (Tad Alexander) and his sisters leaving their palace and being herded into a cellar where an enthusiastic firing squad disposes of them as though they were clay pigeons.

It must not be supposed from these two incidents that Rasputin and the Empress consists entirely of gore and gunpowder. It starts as a pedestrian historical romance, documented with occasional newsreel shots. The Tsarina pats her children on the head. Chegodieff makes love to a lady in waiting (Diana Wynyard). Rasputin endears himself to his betters by curing the ailing Tsarevitch with hypnotism. He acquires control of the government by conspiring with the head of the secret police, loses favor by trying to paddile into the bedroom of an adolescent princess.

One of the chief problems in inventing a picture in which all three Barrymores could act was to think of one in which the brothers would not offend the public by pretending sexual interest in their sister. Rasputin not only solves this problem but gives two of the Barrymores a chance to execute their specialties. Lionel spits on the floor and regurgitates even more loudly than he did in Grand Hotel. Ethel wears a nurse's headdress like the nun's towel she had in The Kingdom of God and hums her lines so as to sound thoroughly regal. Director Richard Boleslavsky, imported from the Moscow Art Theatre, saw to it that the production had surface authenticity, managed sometimes to make it seem more than what it probably is--a resourceful compendium of dignified and exciting hokum. Good shot: Rasputin ordering the Tsarevitch to look through a microscope at a fight between a fly and an ant, then pushing the Tsarevitch away so that he can see it himself.

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