The New Pictures

Thunder Over Mexico (Upton Sinclair) is a feature length null picture whittled out of the gigantic 243,000-ft. opus which Director Sergei Michailovitch Eisenstein made in Mexico over two years ago. In silent form with a musical accompaniment, it investigates a minor miscarriage of social justice on a Mexican hacienda toward the end of the last century. A peon and his fiancee go to their ranch owner for permission to marry. One of the hacendado's guests rapes the girl. The peon strikes her assaulter, then tries with four friends to retrieve the girl from a tower into which she has been tossed. They fail and scamper away, pursued by a posse which includes the hacendado's daughter, who gets shot dead when the posse catches up with the fugitives. The three fugitives who are captured are disposed of by the "horse torture." Servants bury them alive so that only their heads show above ground, then ride over them till they are mashed to death. This wild chronicle--a combination of radical propaganda and old-fashioned "Western"--starts with shots of Aztec ruins, ends with shots of an idealized modern Mexico, symbolized by Mexico City University students in their football suits. It would be undistinguished were it not for the fact that the photography--for which Director Eisenstein and his Camera Man Edouard Tisse were equally responsible--is superb. Critics, esthetes and Socialist Upton Sinclair, who was last week out for Governor of California on a Democratic ticket, have been babbling about Eisenstein's Mexican picture for the last two and one-half years. Since this excerpt from it, which the producers expect to follow with two more feature length pictures and a series of short travelogs, is unsatisfactory, the future of Eisenstein's monster is likely to be as controversial as its past. In 1931 Paramount hired Director Eisenstein, whose Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World were probably the best pre-talkie Russian cinemas to go to Hollywood. He worked for three months on An American Tragedy, was then re moved because he was "too unusual." Upton Sinclair and some of his friends put up $100,000, sent Eisenstein to Mexico where he had in mind an ambitious work to interpret the history, character and appearance of the Mexican people. When Eisenstein finished shooting his Que Viva Mexico! he sent it to Upton Sinclair, went back to Russia. U. S. directors, working with high-salaried actors, cannot afford to use much more film than they plan to have in the finished picture. Russian directors, particularly Eisenstein, are much more likely to choose casts of completely untrained actors, like the Mexican peons whom Eisenstein hired at laborers' pay. They can then afford to use film extravagantly. Assembling and cutting are far more important to Director Eisenstein than to his Hollywood confreres. When Eisenstein returned to Russia without finishing Que Viva Mexico! Upton Sinclair sold the distribution rights to Hollywood Producer Sol Lesser. Controversies started as soon as Producer Lesser revealed his plan for cutting Que Viva Mexico! Upton Sinclair insisted that the cutting followed Eisenstein's original scenario. Critics who had talked to Eisenstein about the picture accused Sinclair of "butchering" the film. They insisted that Eisenstein's original 243,000 ft. contained the material for a cinematic masterpiece, which Thunder Over Mexico is not. Excitable Editor Lincoln Kirstein of Hound & Horn last week got himself ejected from a Manhattan preview of Thunder Over Mexico for trying to voice his objections to the picture, for giving members of the audience handbills denouncing Upton Sinclair. Said Upton Sinclair, when he arrived in Manhattan for last week's premiere: "If these fellows go on making a disturbance, we'll get our money back." In Moscow, Sergei Eisenstein last week let it be known that he was at work on a cinema history of Moscow's last 500 years. S<< O-- S-- Iceberg (Universal). From the comfortable bivouac of his polar expedition on the crest of an Arctic skiing slope, Dr. Lawrence (Rod La Rocque) pushes off alone on the track of another expedition lost some years before. His four companions set off to find him, promptly lose their food. They try to cross a frozen fiord to an Eskimo village. When the ice breaks, they take refuge on a berg. There, nestling in a cave, is Lawrence. As the iceberg floats along, its population increases. First a rescue plane containing Lawrence's wife (Leni Riefenstahl, an obscure but nervy German actress) arrives, gets wrecked landing. Then appear two polar bears and a dead seal. It begins to look as though straps will have to be attached to the iceberg for its passengers to hang on when finally one of the expedition jumps off to swim ashore. A second rescue plane picks him up, takes him to an Eskimo village whose obliging denizens paddle out to the berg in kayaks, ferry the Lawrences back to land. In adventure films of this type, the story is important only as a means of introducing acts of God. The berg-breakings, crevasse-creakings, storms and deaths in S. O. S. Iceberg are sufficiently authentic to be a deterrent to polar exploration, an inducement to emotional chilblains. Made under Director Tay Garnett, by a company that spent a year on location near the coast of Greenland, it is a refrigerated horror story, the more effective because its patterns of ice and sea have an enormous nightmare beauty. The picture would have been better if it had showed more plainly what the explorers ate and what they wore beneath their fur tippets. Good shot: a husky dog slipping into a crevasse and dangling there by his harness until he pulls the rest of the team and then the sled in after him.

My Weakness (Fox-De Sylva). As a vehicle for Lilian Harvey, pert British comedienne who made a U. S. reputation playing in German musicomedies like Congress Dances, this picture has the virtue of being as unpretentious as it is slight. It requires her only to impersonate a stock character: the scullery maid who is metamorphosed into a lady by the attractive young man who has bet his crusty uncle a fortune that he can marry her to a millionaire.

Frail, soft-eyed, graceful and demurely impudent, Miss Harvey gives her role a pleasant, silvery freshness, makes her eventual betrothal to the attractive young man (Lew Ayres) instead of the millionaire (Charles Butterworth) seem satisfactory as well as inevitable. She ably conceals the embarrassment she must have felt for the lyric of a pretty tune called "Gather Lip Rouge While You May." Funniest shot: Butterworth, defeated in love, trying to commit suicide by insulting a gangster.

Wild Boys of the Road (Warner). Eager to maintain their boast that they set the style for other Hollywood companies, Warner Brothers have recently become interested in the problems of adolescent delinquents. In The Mayor of Hell, James Cagney and a juvenile cast headed by Frankie Darro solved the matter of reform schools. Wild Boys of the Road is derived from those parts of a Russian picture called The Road to Life which were not used in The Mayor of Hell. Nonetheless, it is by no means an uninteresting stencil. Darro, aided this time by Edwin Phillips and a young actress named Dorothy Coonan, makes it a compelling, sometimes even an honest, portrait of a brutal and bitter way of life. Eddie Smith and his friend Tommy, unable to help their unemployed parents at home, set off to ride freight trains. They pick up with a girl named Sally who takes them to visit her gay aunt in Cleveland. There they get a chocolate cake, leave by the fire escape when the police come through the door. Sally has an unhappy encounter with a brakeman, Tommy loses a leg under a freight train, Eddie is on his way to becoming a sullen young desperado before the picture pro vides an improbable regeneration including jobs for all three, the promise of a speedy return home. Good shot: a wise, contemptuous old hobo advising Eddie and a hundred or so of his confreres to beat down a handful of railroad detectives who have frightened them off a train. The Solitaire Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Actor Herbert Marshall per formed so ably as a gentleman crook in Paramount's Trouble in Paradise that M-G-M at once saw the necessity for getting him for another such part. In this picture he is one of a band of diamond thieves, niching politely in the capitals of Europe. When one of his accomplices commits too bold a burglary, Marshall undertakes to restore the stolen necklace. In doing so, he gets himself suspected of committing murder. The climax of the picture arrives when he is on board a Paris-to-London plane, in company with his impetuous accomplice (Ralph Forbes), a pretty female thief (Elizabeth Allan), a lugubrious individual who claims to be a Scotland Yard inspector (Lionel Atwill), and a noisy U. S. tourist (Mary Boland). By the time the plane lands at Croydon, Marshall has found means to incriminate the alleged Scotland Yard inspector. He and Miss Allan plan to settle down in Devonshire and reform. The Solitaire Man is a slight, rapid and amusing melo drama, in which even the killings are per formed politely.

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