The New Pictures

13 Hours by Air (Paramount). Rocketing from Newark to San Francisco in a bullet-nosed Boeing are an heiress (Joan Bennett) rushing to intercept her sister's marriage to a cad; the cad's brother (Fred Keating); a bad little boy, his water pistol and his caretaker (Zasu Pitts); the customary gangster, the sleuth trailing him; a transport pilot (Fred MacMurray) returning to duty from a canceled vacation.

Original moves in any story formula as tightly established as the Grand-Hotel-in-Motion must necessarily consist of variations so stylized that, like the moves in chess, they are sensational chiefly to the initiated. One such device is having the off-duty pilot begin a flirtation with the heiress which he culminates grandly only after he has assumed his official status as Head Pilot.

Outstanding performance is Bennie Bartlett's as the bad boy who at a crucial moment squirts fire extinguisher fluid out of his pistol into the gangster's eyes. Aged 9, Bartlett, in the Hollywood tradition, supports a mother, an ailing War-veteran father, three small sisters on his salary as a stock contract player.

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Things to Come (London Films) is a $1,400,000, two-hour cinematic summary of the history of the next 100 years. It marks the debut of Herbert George Wells as a screenwriter. It places Alexander Korda's London Film Productions Ltd. on a par with Hollywood for production power as well as brains. It tells an extraordinary story which, while it may not convince cinemaddicts, is likely to captivate them (see pp. 44 & 45).

Since what happens 100 years hence is of no consequence to anyone now old enough to enjoy the cinema, the notion of producing a film of which the longest and most spectacular portions deal with 2036 seems, at first glance, daringly original.

Original it is. It is daring only by contrast with Hollywood's timid preference for doing, insofar as possible, only what has been done before. Actually, nothing interests people more than matters which do not concern them. Things to Come is therefore magnificent entertainment and a tribute to the sound showmanship that has made Producer Korda the kingpin in England's booming cinema industry.

Beginning in 1940, the picture voices Author Wells's current theory that another world war will start that year. The operations of that war and the destruction of Everytown, which looks very much like London, by a fleet of airplanes should throw a highly practical scare into contemporary audiences. The second portion of Things to Come contributes a reductio ad absurdum of Fascism which should cause it to be banned in Germany and Italy. The climax of the picture is an even more explicit description of a Wellsian Utopia than that foresighted author has ever divulged to his reading public. As a spectacle, Things to Come compares favorably with its Hollywood rivals, from Intolerance to The Crusades, but it differs from all predecessors in its class by demanding a cerebral rather than an emotional response. Its climax is reached not when two lovers are reunited but when an unmarried couple (Pearl Argyle, Kenneth Villiers) more interested in the cosmos than in each other disappear from the screen in the direction of the moon, thus causing the President of the World, Raymond Massey, to state the Wellsian moral: ''All the Universe or nothingness--which shall it be? . . ."

When strangers call at the dingy house in London's Grosvenor Street where London Films has offices, they are likely to be surprised when a fatigued-looking young man, who has ushered them from an anteroom into a comfortable but shabby little office, then seats himself behind its desk and says: "I am Mr. Korda." That, at 42, Kingpin Korda looks and acts like anything but a Hollywood cinemagnate is no accident. A bright young Budapest journalist who got interested in the cinema in 1916, he reached Hollywood by way of Vienna, Rome and Berlin in 1925. His Private Life of Helen of Troy was one of the best silent pictures of its era. When Director Korda left Hollywood in 1928, however, he had had enough of its methods to last him a lifetime. The Private Life of Henry VIII, which he produced on a shoestring in 1933 and which made cinema stars of five actors in the cast from Charles Laughton to Merle Oberon, got him the backing of Prudential Assurance Co. Ltd. It also gave him a chance to explore on a grand scale his own ideas about cinema production, crystallized by a distaste for those of the U. S. industry.

Producer Korda's start as a journalist left him with a respect for the profession of writing. His sojourn in Hollywood convinced him that the importance of writers to the cinema had been vastly underrated, only less foolishly than the importance of the cinema to writers. From this it was a short step to the conclusion that the payroll of London Film Productions, Ltd. was the proper place for an author like H. G. Wells. Few writers of comparable distinction have ever worked in Hollywood. Most of these have either laughed at or despised their jobs. Author Wells, who was on the set most of the time Things to Come was in production, was so delighted that he promptly declared he would concentrate on writing for the screen hereafter. He now considers films "the greatest art," expects them "to oust both opera and stage. . . ."

With enormous backing, a nucleus of a company in which one of his brothers (Vincent) is art director and another (Zoltan) a director. Producer Korda last year arranged to attack the U. S. market (15,000 theatres to Great Britain's 4,000) on a large scale by buying a partnership in United Artists, which releases his pictures in the U. S. For years the English cinema industry functioned in converted garrets, suburban garden backyards and a few vacant lots at Elstree. Producer Korda bought an enormous tract of land at Denham and set about building a $5,000,000 studio which, now almost complete, is as big and as well equipped as anything in Hollywood.

Before starting on Things to Come, the salient production weakness of London Films had been technical. For this picture, which was made before the Denham studios were ready to function, Producer Korda installed a "Special Effects Department" under Ned Mann. More astounding than the gigantic outdoor sets constructed under Art Director Vincent Korda were Mr. Mann's miniatures: a space gun 20 feet high (see cut) with tiny puppets running around it on moving belts; bat-shaped airplanes apparently capable of carrying armies; a sky-darkening air-force swooping over the Dover Cliffs.

Since The Private Life of Henry VIII put new capital and new life into the British cinema industry, U. S. producers have been debating whether the brains behind the shabby desk in Grosvenor Street were really capable of supplying them with serious competition for the world cinema markets. Last week they knew the answer. Things to Come may or may not entrance U. S. cinemaddicts but it is likely to make bigwigs in Hollywood scratch their heads about a future much more immediate than 2036.

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Sutter's Gold (Universal) is a picture which cinemaddicts have been anticipating almost since the start of talkies. Blaise Cendrars' novel--about the Swiss immigrant who settled on land grants in California in 1839, founded a private empire called New Helvetia, lost it when nuggets in his millstream started the gold rush and spent his last years begging Congress for restitution--came to the attention of Universal in 1928. The studio bought it as a vehicle for Jean Hersholt. When Hersholt left to join Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the picture was postponed. In 1934 Director Howard Hawks worked on the story with Screenwriter Gene Fowler. In 1935 Universal made overtures to Charles Laughton to play the lead, but Laughton went to MGM for Mutiny on the Bounty. By last autumn Edward Arnold was signed to play the lead, but by that time there was a shortage of cash. Cheever Cowdin's option on the Universal studio supplied the funds. Production finally got under way in November.

When the picture opened last week, Governor Frank Finley Merriam of California proclaimed Gold Week, and Sacramento held a warm-up for its 1939 Hometown Jubilee. There was a Governor's "Sutter's Gold Ball." Carl Laemmle and entourage arrived in five private cars. Local merchants displayed themselves in 1849 costumes and sideburns.

To critics outside Sacramento the efforts involved in getting Sutter's Gold on the screen seemed last week as misdirected as the celebration over its opening was unjustified. Hampered by a script that characterized its hero variously as paragon and scoundrel, pinchpenny and profligate, altruist and profiteer, without ever making him a human being, the best Producer Edmund Grainger, Director James Cruze and Actors Arnold, Lee Tracy and Binnie Barnes could offer the public was 85 minutes of dignified boredom, which suggested that the producers of Sutter's Gold had wearied of the performance before it began.

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