The New Pictures

Accused (Criterion) starts in the formula of a backstage musicomedy, ends in the formula of a courtroom melodrama. The transition occurs when someone murders the leading lady (Florence Desmond) of a Paris revue, just after her advances to the show's male dancer (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) have aroused the indignation of his knife-throwing wife (Dolores Del Rio).

Current problem of the cinema industry in England is whether the U. S. talent that it is now importing will supply it with a trace of Hollywood dash. Second production of enterprising Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s London studio, with an American author (Zoe Akins), director (Thornton Freeland) and two Hollywood principals, Accused suggests that, on the contrary, England may infect Hollywood emigres with that dignified lethargy that has been the drawback of so many British pictures in the past. Well-acted by conscientious members of the vast theatre population which is one of London's chief attractions as a cinema capital, it suffers from a torpor so pronounced that U. S. audiences are likely to suspect that the murdered leading lady is not really dead but dozing. Good shot: Dolores Del Rio--whose next U. S. picture will be Devil's Playground--in a jealous rage.

The Plainsman (Paramount), one of the most expensive westerns and one of the most grown up, consciously preserves the faults and virtues characteristic of ordinary westerns. Hordes of Indians bite the dust, 1,200 genuine Montana Cheyennes having been lured by $3.50 daily pay envelopes from the comfortable inertia of WPA work. Bad characters are smeared in charcoal black, heroes and heroines arrayed in magic garments of daring and beauty, playing a game of desperate designs upon a landscape lonely, hostile and magnificent. Its technique is the technique of the chase. Through most of its turbulent length it is excitingly devised, brilliantly photographed and filled to overflowing with Nick Carter characters who suddenly take on larger-than-life proportions, as if sculptured by Rodin.

"Wild Bill" Hickok (Gary Cooper), famed scout, is detailed by General Custer to go after Yellow Hand (Paul Harvey), a Cheyenne chief who is leading his people on the warpath. At the same time Hickok's friend Bill Cody (James Ellison) rides to relieve a Federal garrison beleaguered by the Indians. Hickok's girl, Calamity Jane (Jean Arthur), can cut a man's hat off at 40 ft. with a mule-skinner's rawhide but cannot quite bear to watch Wild Bill roasted on a spit by the Cheyennes. Her disclosure under pressure of the trail taken by Cody's detail causes Cody fall into an Indian ambush, Wild Bill to renounce his love Preview audiences wrote the studio protesting as unlikely the scene in which Cody and a handful of soldiers broke by volley firing the charge of a far superior force ot mounted Indians. Studio defense 48 troopers saved themselves from 800 Cheyennes by this means at Beecher's Island Colo., on Sept. 17, 1868.

Wild Bill takes a new trail, following one Lattimer (Charles Bickford) the sinister agent of some grafting Cabinet members who hope to sell the Cheyennes repeating rifles left over from the Civil War. Best sequence in the picture comes when Wild Bill has killed Lattimer and rounded up his gang. To pass the time until the cavalry arrives he starts a poker game. The man behind the bar, a cringing knave outstandingly played by Porter Hall finds a gun in a drawer. It takes him half the sequence to get nerve enough to shoot Bill Hickok in the back. Finally he does it.

Skillful casting and makeup has wrought a group of bit players in the opening scene into a realistic facsimile of Lincoln's Cabinet. Cinemagoers with good memory of their history books may recognize Secretary of State Seward, Secretary ot War Stanton, Attorney General Speed Postmaster General William Dennison.

Seldom has Cecil B. De Mille recaptured so successfully the sweep of panoramic action which was his hallmark in the silent days. Often his cameras, handled by four of Hollywood's topflight cinematographers, clinch the pictorial language of the plains in brief, consummate idioms: a stagecoach ribboning down the long slant of a prairie shoulder; the Cheyennes charging up a shallow river riding so evenly their ranks look like a drift of mist; braves in war paint raiding a cabin where two women are alone; a herd of buffalo, with a scout's horse among them grazing in the burnt grass.

Slalom (H. R. Sokal, Vienna) is the first full-length skiing picture with a plot to be shown in the U. S. It takes its name from the skier's term for a downhill race around obstacles. Slalom's plot runs downhill all the way, is inconsequential except as a frame for the finest skiing and skiing photography the cinema has yet displayed.

Irked when her fiance laughs at her inability to do winter sports, the heroine .Hella Hartwich) goes to St. Moritz to learn. There she encounters two ski-larking jacks-of-all-trades (tall Walter Riml, tiny Guzzi Lantschner) who teach her to ski in the intervals when they are not clowning on skates or escaping from the local policeman. Becoming superbly skillful almost overnight, the heroine dresses as a man, shows up her fiance by beating him in the skijoring and bobsled races I hen he recognizes her, leads her astray m the slalom to a ski wedding with a dozen top-hatted ushers tail-wagging down the mountain in formation.

Made several years ago in Europe Slalom has German dialog in the rare moments when anyone speaks. Most of it is pixie pantomime, easily understood. The two ski teachers dominate the picture are on the screen almost all the time doing everything on skis from Christies to Gelaendespruenge with extraordinary skill Walter Riml is a ski teacher in the Tyrol Guzzi Lantschner comes of a famed skiing family, took second in the last Olympic slalom. Their complete mastery is pointed up both by their continual burlesque of normal ski technique and by the beauty of the photography. Chief cameraman was Hans Schneeberger, who shot the remarkable White Hell of Pitz Palu (TIME Oct. 13 1930). To catch the skiing antics of the chief characters of Slalom, he rode along beside them with his camera mounted on his skis, thus avoiding that flaw of most skiing cinemas in which the skier flashes past and is gone. Not only did Cameraman Schneeberger get some of the world's best pictures of skiing, but he managed to frame them in the rugged beauty of the high Alps. Many an Alpine skier will recognize the peaks and slopes of Castor and Pollux. Good shots: Guzzi somersaulting over a fence; Guzzi and Walter treading a ski dance; the angry village policeman biting the crust while his skis and boots run on without him.

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