The New Pictures

Wings Over Ethiopia (Paramount). Last year a Swiss cameraman, E. Berna, and a Swiss director, L. Wechsler, flew into Ethiopia to make a picture which they hoped to sell, partly as a travelog and partly as exploitation for a newly formed Swiss-African airline. They had little luck in either direction until Mussolini went to war and they found themselves owning a feature worth, perhaps, a million dollars.

Wings Over Ethiopia proves that a grasp of that wild land is not complete even when one knows that the army marches barefoot and the Emperor wears a beard. Women, black and well-formed, with big teeth polished white, put butter on their hair and brand their children for identification by cutting their faces with razors. Each generally takes one husband, five lovers. Warriors cannot marry till they have killed an enemy. Against the tawny brushwood slanting up & down enormous gorges, their squat villages are undetectable at a few hundred yards. The jungle flowers with snakes, acacia and spiky plants whose juice can blind a man. Tribes pass around infectious skin diseases in gay, communal bathing and make war without caring much whether they use spears or ancient muskets dumped into Africa from the continental wars of the 19th Century.

The camera is at its best in Addis Ababa, an unreal capital of tin roofs, eucalyptus trees, pomp, zoos, and scalawag promoters, with an apostolic Christianity 1,400 years old and a law and etiquet unflustered since the First Crusades. Debtors are chained to creditors. Sentences for murder are executed by the victim's relatives. Swedish drillmasters school the royal army of black bucks, and in a carefully landscaped estate Haile Selassie's daughters, olive-skinned young women with intelligent, quiet faces, wander listlessly with a little silky dog as if wondering what good their European education was doing them. There are shots of the Emperor's councilmen, their straight backs, long fingers, curved nostrils and slumberous, dominating eyes telling of Arabic aristocracy mixed with the blood of Solomon. And in the jungle, there are marvelous silhouet shots of nude bodies slithering in a love dance with white eyeballs rolling, flanks quivering and palms upraised. War-drums, gabble, the music of the freed slaves in Emperor Jones costumes and other incidental sounds were dubbed in at the Paramount laboratories together with a sensible verbal accompaniment.

I Live My Life (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The taming effect which love for a son of toil can have upon a daughter of the rich has been photographed before but never with the sparkle that this has. They meet in a ditch on the island of Naxos where Brian Aherne has been probing for statues and Joan Crawford, ashore from her father's yacht, for adventure. The story gathers momentum with the progress of their acquaintance through a flirtation, which ends in her giving him a bogus name, and a second meeting in New York, toward her repentance and, eventually, Love. This time it does not end here but proceeds to satisfy the logic of its light-mannered premises. Miss Crawford's moral bankruptcy is liquidated to a point at which she is ready to give up the love that salvaged her in order to keep her father (Frank Morgan) from less figurative pauperism. Ineffective, charming Morgan stops her sacrifice; the last barrier to union with Archeologist Aherne is gone, so far as she is concerned, but he sustains his course of discipline until her addictions to finance, snobbery and fancy dress are overcome and she is ready to go back to Naxos for further statuedigging.

O'Shaughnessy's Boy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) introduces a new and slightly Freudian note into the father & son relationship which Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper capitalized so successfully in The Champ. This time the moist elephantine fondness of a circus animal trainer for his cry-baby offspring is complicated by the circumstance that the son has been encouraged, by a spinster aunt (Sarah Haden), to hold his father responsible for the death of his mother and, in consequence, to detest him bitterly. The climax of the picture comes when a court awards Windy O'Shaughnessy (Beery) provisional custody of his son and Windy, broken down by years of sorrow that preceded the reunion, succeeds, by overcoming his son's hatred, in regaining the self-confidence that enables him to make an elephant walk through a hoop of flame with a tiger in its howdah.

In the years since The Champ, Jackie Cooper has grown big enough to need a substitute (Spanky McFarland) in scenes showing him as an infant but neither this nor the element of filial antagonism introduced by O'Shaughnessy's Boy really alters the essential pattern. Throughout the picture, Beery sweats, Cooper weeps and susceptible audiences are likely to enjoy themselves enormously.

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