The New Pictures

The New Gulliver (Amkino) contains what is probably the most extraordinary cast ever seen in cinema: 3,000 puppets. Made of clay, rubber, metal, wood and cloth, specially designed to act for the camera, they are operated not by strings like ordinary marionettes but by invisible human hands which change the puppets' positions and expressions between each film exposure. It took 25 separate shots, for example, to show a puppet raising his arm. This process gives their activities the staccato quality of a Walt Disney cartoon but it is by no means their principal claim to distinction. Representing the population of Lilliputia, the puppets in The New Gulliver are about three inches high. Their tiny faces, designed by Sarra Mokil, who spent two and a half years having them made, suggest Daumier drawings translated into three dimensions. Creased by tiny grins, twisted by picayune emotions of fear, alarm and love, they squeal and whisper, wiggle, grimace and frown in terrifying parody that would doubtless have delighted Jonathan Swift. Whether the author of Gulliver's Travels would be equally pleased by the use Soviet cinemanufacturers have made of his masterpiece in other respects is more debatable.

The only human importantly concerned in the picture is a 14-year-old boy (V. Konstantinov) who falls asleep at a picnic where a companion has been reading aloud from Gulliver's Travels. Dreaming, he thinks he is Dr. Petya Gulliver, sees himself cast up, after mutiny and shipwreck, on the desolate coast of Lilliputia. The tiny citizens bind his arms and feet with threads. The fierce police chief arrives in a nutshell armored car. The fire department of Lilliputia runs a hose into his mouth. An army of tanks hitched to a gigantic platform haul him to the capital where the idiot king of Lilliputia is presiding over a special session of the Senate convened to dispose of Dr. Gulliver.

Charmed with their drowsy man-mountain, the Lilliputians rig up a conveyor belt to feed him, entertain him with a stage show in which a peewee ballet dances, a morose tenor sings a superb ballad (My Little Lilliput Girl) and a troupe of midgets, as small to the Lilliputians as the Lilliputians are to Gulliver, caper mysteriously in front of him. When a stage manager hits a midget with a stick. Gulliver perceives the sad truth: Lilliputia is a Capitalist nation. He speedily allies himself with the Workers Party, drags the Lilliputian navy out to sea, smiles when the frantic little king hangs himself on the hands of a gigantic clock. Then Gulliver wakes up at the picnic.

Rendezvous (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Based on Herbert O. Yardley's American Black Chamber (TIME, April 17, 1933), this picture deals with the technique of counter-espionage at Intelligence Service headquarters in Washington during the War. Though the intrigue is sometimes unintelligibly involved, the story is swiftly paced, manages by a parade of ingenious tricks to provide sustained entertainment. It also arouses wonder that, with German spies as thick as fleas and clever as foxes, the War Department managed to keep any secrets whatever.

Lieutenant Bill Gordon (William Powell) is a master of enciphering and deciphering codes, conceals the fact from his superiors because he hankers for action at the front. He makes the mistake of telling this to Joel (Rosalind Russell), a girl whom he meets at a charity bazaar and who falls shamelessly in love with him. When she tells her uncle, the Assistant Secretary of War, about his talents, Gordon is ordered to a desk in the decoding room. Disgruntled but still as suave as ever, Gordon decodes intercepted German wirelesses which show a U. S. transport in danger, comes to grips with an astute woman spy (Binnie Barnes), defends himself from Joel's well-meaning but blundering attentions which include putting sleeping tablets in his coffee, buying him a heavy bullet-proof vest. Her indignant belief that his attentions to the female spy are nothing but a wanton flirtation finally lands them in a trap where the dapper lieutenant saves Joel from gunfire by knocking her down with a blow on the jaw, almost precisely as Powell did to Myrna Loy in The Thin Man.

Two M-G-M actresses have benefited by Myrna Loy's salary strike last summer. Luise Rainer got Miss Loy's part in Escapade. That picture, in which William Powell starred, encouraged the studio to try the trick again in Rendezvous. Before that, Rosalind Russell, 28, had appeared in eight minor roles, impressed critics most favorably in Forsaking All Others.

Daughter of a prosperous Connecticut criminal lawyer named James E. Russell, Rosalind Russell has two brothers in Wall Street. After a private school education, she traveled abroad, gratified her ambition to become an actress with minor parts in European stock companies. When she returned to the U. S., she toured for nine months with a tent show before taking a small Broadway part in The Second Man. A one-night Hollywood performance in No More Ladies led to an M-G-M contract. She is a collector of first editions of children's books, reasonably good at fashionable sports and lives in the smallest house (living room, bedroom, bath) in Beverly Hills. Afflicted by chronic insomnia and aware that she will not be able to sleep until dawn, she employs every decorous reason she can invent to detain guests. In Rendezvous, she had three duplicates of all dresses and shoes to avoid delays for wardrobe replacements. Transatlantic Tunnel (Gaumont-British) exhibits the British cinema industry, long noted for its delvings into history, hopefully examining the future. Suggested by the speech in which Stanley Baldwin declared that an alliance between the U. S. and Britain would be a sanction no power on earth would dare to face (TIME, June 17), it proposes an intercontinental subway line and shows the difficulties involved in engineering such a marvel. The workers are hampered by a submarine volcano, the machinations of an armament tycoon and domestic difficulties that beset the chief engineer (Richard Dix). His wife (Madge Evans) thinks he is in love with a U. S. millionaire's daughter (Helen Vinson) and deserts him, a mishap for which the engineer blames his best friend (Leslie Banks).

In addition to the full-time performers in the cast, Transatlantic Tunnel is distinguished by the presence of two famed actors who introduce their specialties as bit parts--George Arliss as the British Prime Minister and Walter Huston as the U. S. President, circa 1985 A.D. The film is an exciting if misleading cinematic horoscope to which futuristic fashion notes were contributed by Schiaparelli. Good shot: gas-masked workmen chatting via television telephones.

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