The New Pictures

Winterset (RKO) is Maxwell Anderson's play, transferred to the screen by Producer Pandro S. Herman with such honesty, intelligence and skill that it betters its original. By abbreviating some of Author Anderson's less appropriate flights of poetry, Anthony Veiller, who wrote the screen play, improved the dialog. RKO's art director, Van Nest Polglase, taking his key from the stage sets designed by Jo

Mielziner, extended the gloomy back ground of the shadows and cellars under a big city bridge to fit the wider range of Cameraman Peverell Marley's lenses.

Against this background, a dramatic story and the acting of a fine cast, four of whose members were in the stage version, make Winterset, brilliantly directed by Alfred Santell, a production that is sure to be listed among the best pictures of the year.

A drama built around the after effects of a miscarriage of justice in a situation paralleling the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Winterset starts with a quick outline of a 1920 payroll robbery. Three gangsters -- Trock Estrella (Eduardo Ciannelli), Shadow (Stanley Ridges), and Garth Esdras (Paul Guilfoyle) -- steal a car that belongs to Bartolomeo Romagna. After they have murdered the paymaster, they abandon the car. Romagna, partly because he is a radical, is convicted of the crime. His small son is standing on the hill above the prison the night he dies in the electric chair. Obsessed by the desire to clear his father's name, Mio Romagna (Burgess Meredith) gets a clue 15 years later when he learns from a newspaper clipping that Garth -- suspected at the time of knowing something about the murder -- was never called as a witness. To the dank tenement under an East River bridge where Garth is living with his benign old father (Maurice Moscovitch) and his innocent young sister (Margo), Mio goes one rainy win ter night to learn what Garth can tell him.

Circumstances complicate his mission. One is that when he meets Margo in the square outside her house, they fall in love with each other. The others are that both Judge Gaunt (Edward Ellis), who sentenced Romagna, and Trock Estrella, just out of prison and dying of consumption, have also seen newspaper stories which suggest the advisability of reopening the case. All three--the killer, the avenger and the blundering judge--arrive at the Esdras basement tenement the same night.

Upshot of this grim situation in the play was that Mio, learning the identity of the murderer through his conversation with Trock, was himself murdered by Trock's trigger men before he could take the truth outside the shadows of the bridge. The picture, inspired more, it appears, by valid dramatic logic than by the Hays organization edict that Justice always triumphs on the screen, arranges a totally different conclusion. In it, after he has killed Shadow and Garth, Trock is shot dead by one of his own henchmen. Mio, apparently doomed to die in the trap they have set, finds a way to bring the law to rescue Margo and himself.

That Winterset will fail to appeal to the cinema's mass audience is likely. As an investment for RKO it can therefore be measured mainly as an introduction to the cinema public of several new faces.

Margo's--which cinemaddicts have seen before but never under such favorable circumstances--is most likely to become familiar.

Margarita Bolado was born in Mexico City, on May 10, 1917. Her father, a Snanish surgeon, died when she was .

Her mother was one of the 32 children of a twice married Spanish rancher. Margo lived in New York and California with her mother and her maternal grandmother.

When she was nine, her mother went back to Mexico and Margo did not see her again until just before she opened in the stage version of Winter set. When she was 11, Margo made her stage debut, in child and adult roles for a stock company at First and Main Streets, Los Angeles. At 12 she staged the dances for the cinema In Gay Madrid (1930). At 13, she was a Fox tap dancer. Years of dancing lessons, under Michio Ito, Fokine, Eduardo & Elisa Cansino, brought her at last a specialty dancer's job at Agua Caliente.

Here she attracted the attention of Rene Black, manager of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Starlight Roof. As his new orchestra leader, he signed Xavier Cugat, of Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove, without knowing that, married to one of her mother's 19 sisters, Xavier was Margo's uncle.

It was while dancing at the Waldorf that Margo, disheartened by a Paramount test which made her too exotic, tried for a part in a picture Screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were making in Astoria. Asked what previous experience she had had, she decided that if she told the truth it would sound like a lie so she told a lie by saying that she had played ingenue roles in Spain, studied for four years at the Royal Academy of Madrid. The lie got her the part that made her famous--Carmen Brown in Crime Without Passion. After roles in two Hollywood Paramount and MGM pictures --Rhumba and The Robin Hood of El Dorado--Margo was picked for the stage role in Winterset.

Rembrandt (London Film). To recreate Painter Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn, Cinemactor Charles Laughton and Art Director Vincent Korda journeyed to Amsterdam, exhaustively studied the great Dutch master's life and work, while Producer-Director Alexander Korda and Writer Carl Zuckmayer plotted out a meticulously faithful biography. Then they chose eight characteristic Rembrandt self-portraits, had them superimposed in a composite photograph which Laughton used as a model for his makeup. Rembrandt by Laughton is almost identical in appearance with Rembrandt by Rembrandt. This excellence of make-up is surpassed only by the merit of the picture, which is one of the year's subtlest and finest.

Son of a wealthy miller, Rembrandt was born in Leyden in 1606, moved to Amsterdam about 1631, where he married beautiful Saskia van Uylenborch and rapidly became Holland's most fashionable painter.

It is here, at the peak of prosperity and popularity, that Rembrandt begins. A lusty, hearty, generous man with no sense about money, he is rollicking with friends when the first blow falls--Saskia dies.

Second blow is the surly reception to Rembrandt's mass portrait of Captain Banning Cocq's conceited officers. This huge, sombre painting, generally called The Night Watch, is now recognized as one of the world's greatest. When it was unveiled, all Amsterdam laughed, both at the officers and at Rembrandt. Even his friends could not understand his modern chiaroscuro. As a result, Rembrandt's art went out of style, himself into bankruptcy.

Disheartened Rembrandt replaces Saskia by making his housekeeper Geertje Dirx (Gertrude Lawrence) his mistress.

When her nagging at his refusal to "behave himself" in paint becomes insupportable, he replaces her with another housemaid, Hendrickje Stoffels (Elsa Lanchester, Mrs. Charles Laughton). Her gentle guidance gives him a new lease on happiness, brings back some measure of prosperity. But she is excommunicated for bearing his child. Before he can marry her, she dies, leaving him to a penniless, unkempt, disreputable, lonely old age which never dulls his inner merriment or distracts his joy in paint.

Playing his part with enormous gusto against handsome Dutch sets, Actor Laughton dominates Rembrandt, gives one of his finest performances at a dignified pace which well befits the life of his noble, if somewhat ribald, model. Best shot: Sonorous Painter Rembrandt rolling off a long, sensuous soliloquy defining Woman, while the mouths of stolid Dutchmen flap open and servant girls go glassy-eyed with dreams.

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