The New Pictures

The Warrior's Husband (Fox-Lasky) is a farce about the Amazons, somewhat in the manner popularized by John Erskine. It shows them happily inhabiting a country where the men--mostly effeminate or superannuated--have the social position usually ascribed to ladies in the age of Victoria. Handsome young Antiope (Elissa Landi), assistant general of the Amazon army, is incredulous when told that Greek troops, all males, are threatening the Amazon capital. Her sister, Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) is amazed when one of her counselors suggests that she try the unheard of experiment of marriage. She ridicules the idea of staying faithful to her silky little groom (Ernest Truex) but agrees to the ceremony because her treasury is running short of money and his mother has plenty of it. The main trouble with The Warrior's Husband is that its theme lacks capacity for development. Once the original idea sinks in there is nothing very comical--unless you think a joke improves with repetition --about the war with the Greeks which presently sets in. Naturally Antiope falls in love with a Greek hoplite (David Manners). When Hercules--portrayed as a puffing, timid lout by Stanley Sandford-- stumbles into camp he is roguishly made a prisoner by Hippolyta's ringlet-bearded little spouse, who subsequently realizes that he can advance his coy campaign for the emancipation of men by giving Hercules what he came for, the girdle of Diana. When Hercules skulks off with this talisman, the Amazons' power over their men goes with it. The Amazon army surrenders as promptly and completely as could be expected.

This second production for Fox by Jesse Louis Lasky, longtime Paramount- Publix vice president, has some of the qualities which distinguished his first, Zoo in Budapest. It is beautifully mounted, magnificently photographed and handled with more taste than the stage version from which it was adapted by Ralph Spence. Typical shot: Amazon troops saluting Hippolyta with a gesture calling attention to their most celebrated physical characteristic.

The Kiss Before the Mirror (Universal) is a thoughtful little drama based on the premise that you should think twice before you give your wife a kiss while she is at her dressing table. Two men try it in this picture. Both fare badly. Dr. Bernstoff (Paul Lukas) suspects from Mrs. Bernstoff's indifference that she is preparing for a rendezvous. When his suspicions are verified, he kills her, then tells the whole story to his old friend and lawyer Dr. Paul Held (Frank Morgan). Dr. Held wastes no time kissing Mrs. Held (Nancy Carroll) under the same circumstances and with the same results-- except that, instead of killing his unfaithful spouse immediately, he merely insists that she attend the trial of Dr. Bernstoff. He then puts up such an eloquent defence that the prisoner is acquitted and Mrs. Held really sees the error of her ways.

Adapted from a Hungarian comedy by Ladislaus Fodor, directed by James Whale, The Kiss Before the Mirror has a smooth surface, good acting and a compactly organized, if tricky, story. It lacks action and emphasis. Good shot: Dr. Held listening with growing interest to his wife's tirade at him for mussing her hair. The Barbarian (M e t r o-Goldwyn- Mayer) contains a personage whose type used to be almost as important in the cinema as the cowboy whom he helped to supplant. He is a sheik wearing a romantic turban, bedsheets and a polite but hungry leer. His name is Jamil (Ramon Novarro) and he is first seen functioning, for reasons of his own, as a guide to tourists in a Cairo hotel. When the proud but passionate fiancee (Myrna Loy) of a swagger young Englishman arrives to see the sights, it is not hard to guess how Jamil will show them to her. He kidnaps her in the desert, sings to her, takes her to his native village, beats her, lets her go back to Cairo to marry her Britisher, abducts her once more just before the ceremony. For cinemaddicts of the current crop--who may be less ready than their predecessors to believe that sheiks are irresistible per se --Authors Edgar Selwyn & Anita Loos contributed a new mite to the formula: the heroine explains Jamil's fascination for her by telling him that her mother was an Egyptian.

Efforts to dress up the theme--by such touches as this or by having Jamil take himself a shade less seriously than the old sheiks used to do--help, not to modernize the picture, but to give it a certain wistful charm. The memory of Rudolph Valentino is still green in Hollywood. In The Sheik (1921) he coined a U. S. epithet and a mint of money for Paramount. The Barbarian is more than a belated imitation; like some of the songs which Jamil sings it is a plaintive serenade, begging audiences not to forget an old favorite. Most inevitable shot: Myrna Loy, dreamily indignant, slicing Novarro's cheek with a camel whip.

The Eagle and the Hawk (Paramount). What the sheik was to the comparatively repressed cinemaddicts of the early null the aviator is to audiences now. The contemporary hero does not entirely gain by the comparison. He is covered with grease and what he has to say for himself is frequently drowned out by the uproar of machine guns and propellers with which the talkies so constantly belie their name. In this picture routine shots and noises of planes taking off, landing, crashing, planes upside down, on their noses, in hangars or at war with each other serve almost to obliterate an interesting character study of a War ace who shoots himself because he despises the business of killing human beings whom he has no reason to hate. When he gets a chance, Fredric March--a conscientious, intelligent rather than a brilliant actor--makes the growing emotional pressure of a man who finds himself in a quandary which he can do nothing to escape, seem immensely credible and vivid. The incident in the story by John Monk Saunders is as melodramatic as is customary for narratives of its type. The last sequence--in which a gunner puts the pilot's corpse in a plane and riddles it with bullets to make it look as though he had died in battle--is characteristic. But even episodes like the one in which Jerry Young (March) shoots down a young German ace, then has hysterics at a banquet in his honor to celebrate the achievement, acquire validity from March's handling of his role.

Because the main substance of the picture is true, original and, in its conclusion, daring. The Eagle and the Hawk is worth seeing. Gary Grant gives a sound performance as Jerry Young's bloodthirsty gunner. Jack Oakie's customary comedy role--of a young man overcome by breezy concupiscence--fits in well. Good shot: March, off for London on furlough, taking leave of Oakie, lounging in a bathtub on the lawn outside his quarters.

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