The New Pictures

Mister Hobo (Gaumont-British) is another of those amiable little fables like The Millionaire, The King's Vacation, The Man Who Played God, which serve to occupy the time of George Arliss between important pictures like Disraeli and The House of Rothschild. In this one Mr. Arliss also bears the name of Rothschild-- Franc,ois Rothschild--although he is a gentle French tramp known as "Spike." The Arliss portrait of this character emerges as that of a sentimental, sly and unkempt old gentleman with a fund of stale homilies about nature and a hatred of money and indoor shelter.

When Spike and Flit, his companion, are arrested for illegal fishing, the police laugh when Spike gives his name, stop laughing when he shows his identification card, telephone the Rothschilds who good-naturedly send the obscure bearer of their august patronym a check for 2,000 francs. At Flit's insistence the two go to a bank to cash the check, are wined & dined by the bank's unscrupulous head who thinks he can stave off a crash by making Franc,ois Rothschild a figurehead president. President Rothschild discovers that the banker is trying to bilk a girl out of her mining property, foils the plot, puts his tramp clothes on again, takes the road south.

Crime and Punishment (Columbia). It was bad enough for Roderick Raskolnikov to graduate from the University with the highest honors and then starve in a garret writing articles on crime. But it would be worse for his sister, Antonia, to be forced by poverty to marry Lushin, filthy prig. Would money stop this? Up tenement house stairs crept Raskolnikov; the old pawnbroker let him in: a quick blow with a poker--only stupid criminals are caught. What did Porfiry, police inspector, really know? Raskolnikov swore, shouted, bluffed, sneered, bragged. Contemptuously he advised dewlapped Inspector Porfiry how to catch a criminal. Only one slip, an unimportant one: the way he fainted that day in police headquarters, to which he was dragged for arrears in rent, when they brought in that half-crazy painter who had found an earring near the pawnbroker's, tried to sell it, and had then been accused of murder. Raskolnikov bought a fine new suit, ignored the way Inspector Porfiry drummed with his fingers. ("I drum, with my fingers when I'm face to face with a guilty man.") Inside himself, however, he gasped, reeled and staggered under a tormenting burden. ("I was strong enough to commit a crime; I will be strong enough to live with one.") The torment was worse after the innocent, the crazy one, confessed. Raskolnikov could find no peace until he told his sin to Sonya, the prostitute who loved him. Then there was no peace for either of them until they went to Porfiry to ask for punishment.

The story, with Dostoievsky's sociological polemics stripped away, moves to a tempo of foreboding, unheard drums, with an intensity so great the camera seems itself to be the living, tortured mind of Raskolnikov. Part of Crime and Punishment's force results from Producer B. P. Schulberg's casting in important roles of two young actresses who give superb performances--Tala Birell as Antonia, Marian Marsh as Sonya. More important was Schulberg's insistence on having Josef von Sternberg direct--a choice few producers would have made since von Sternberg was facing virtual boycott, as a consequence of his outbursts of temperament, his disregard for budgets. Most of all the picture owes to Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov. So subtly that one is hardly aware when one phase merges with another, he splits Raskolnikov into four different people: 1) a sensitive student, happy and confident; 2) a half-starved intellectual, developing his own neurosis; 3) a contemptuous psychopath, living a twisted likeness to his hero, Napoleon, greatest of killers; 4) a childlike martyr, radiant in redemption. Skillfully Screenwriters Joseph Anthony and S. K. Lauren, who worked nine months to achieve their effect, have built the steps between the killer, detestable when he commits his crime, to the hero, calm when he emerges at the end. Even plot suspense is geared on Raskolnikov's mental state until terror that he will be detected is supplanted by a greater terror that he may not get release by owning up. Edward Arnold (Inspector Porfiry) got $30,000 for two weeks' adequate acting. Lorre drew only $750 a week. Determined to justify Producer Schulberg's faith in him, Director von Sternberg broke all his own rules by cutting his shooting schedule from 35 to 28 days. He cut in half the time required to light each set by having them all painted grey, eliminating adjustments for refractions from colored surfaces. Defying his reputation as a prima donna, he crawled around Columbia stages measuring his camera angles with a tape measure, gave orders in a subdued voice, got mad with nobody.

Currently showing in Manhattan is a French version of Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov is played by hot-eyed, hungry-looking Pierre Blanchar, Sonya by beautiful, hungry-looking Madeleine Ozeray. No less tautly acted and directed than Crime and Punishment, Crime et Chatiment is closer to its original in its 19th Century costumes and gloomy St. Petersburg backgrounds than are the modern dress and neutral sets of von Sternberg's picture.

So Red the Rose (Paramount). Plantation Negroes burst out with spirituals during two high spots in this adaptation of Stark Young's romantic novel of the Old South. They sing when their master (Walter Connolly) goes off in a barouche to light in the War between the States. They sing again when his daughter (Margaret Sulla van) induces them not to rebel, leads them marching to the white-columned house where the old massa, home from the War, dies with a mint julep in his hand.

Other sequences not quite so spurious, in So Red the Rose establish Miss Sulla van as a high-spirited belle who loves her cousin (Randolph Scott) but resents his conscientious reluctance to fight Yankees. Her mother (Janet Beecher) is presented as a gallant lady who drives to a battlefield when she hears her dying son calling, and who later sets up what remains of her family in a shack after the Yankees have burned the plantation house. Writers Laurence Stallings, Maxwell Anderson and Edwin Justus Mayer presumably did their best with So Red the Rose, failed to save it from being a rambling catalog of Civil War cliches.

Southern exhibitors attempted miracles of press-agentry when So Red the Rose opened in capitals of eleven States of the late Confederacy. The Governors of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia were persuaded to attend their States' premieres. Other tie-ups involved old Confederate veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Confederate flags, usherettes in crinolines, red roses, wreaths on monuments, broadcasts of premieres.

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