The New Pictures

God's Country and the Woman

(Warner Bros.). Instead of Arabia or Becky Sharp, Producer Hal Wallis chose the more realistic subject of the Northwest woods and the logging industry for this Technicolor. Cast, technical crew, Director William Keighley and Red Spierling, logging superintendent of the Crown Willamette Paper Co., whose crew set a world's record in 1931 by getting out 1,662,000 ft. of lumber in a single day, spent two months at Longview, Wash., making the outdoor sequences. The result, as background of a story loosely adapted from James Oliver Curwood's 1922 novel, is the most spectacular investigation of the lumber industry so far contributed by the screen. It is also in many respects the most effective, because least exotic, contribution to the screen so far made in Technicolor.

Recalled from a playboy career in Europe by his brother who heads the family lumber company, Steve Russett (George Brent) lands a plane on a lake in timber that belongs to their arch rival, Jo Barton. When Jo Barton (Beverly Roberts) turns out to be a spitfire blonde, Steve stays on as a lumberjack, works up to foreman before Jo finds out who he is. By the time she fires him as a spy, they are in love. This complicates his brother's scheme to force Jo to sell him her land by engineering a jam of Barton logs that her men can reach only by trespassing on Russett property. Steve, who has already expressed his devotion to Jo by fighting with a disloyal lumberjack (Barton MacLane), winning the esteem of her foreman (Alan Hale), and driving a supply train through a Russett barricade, finally makes her believe in it by dynamiting the jam while the personnel of both lumber camps enjoy a free-for-all fight on the river bank. Good shots: An expert logger nonchalantly retrieving a water bottle from the notch in a fir tree, just as the notch closes when the tree falls; the timber country color photographed from the air, with fir-covered mountains spread out to blue horizons in the pattern of enormous deep-green surf.

Camille (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). For this version of Alexandre Dumas' famed tearjerker, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer assembled the three best current writers of tearjerkers, the top director of tearjerkers, the screen's No. i tragedienne and the industry's current male box-office sensation. The result, against the lush background of Art Director Cedric Gibbons' notion of 19th Century Paris, equipped with generous measures of sorrow, pictorial beauty, charm, plot, glamour and audience appeal, amounts to a Camillennium.

Marguerite Gautier (Greta Garbo), Parisian demimondaine, breaks with her protector (Henry Daniell) when she falls in love with young Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), breaks with Duval when his father tells her she is spoiling his career, finally dies of consumption complicated by a broken heart. For modern audiences this story lacks one element: surprise. Its situations, from the one in which Armand first shows his love for Marguerite by returning to her a handkerchief which he has kept in his pocket ever since the day six months before when she dropped it in a theatre, to the one in which, dying, she struggles to her dressing table to rouge her pale cheeks when he comes to visit her for the last time, have become a master pattern for generations of romantic tragedies.

Screen Writers Zoe Akins, Frances Marion and James Hilton might easily have fallen into the error of trying .to give the story new twists. Instead, they emphasized every cliche, with the paradoxical result of preserving intact the story's inherent emotional vitality. Looking so beautiful that it is hard to believe she has so much as a cold in the head, Garbo wisely minimizes Marguerite Gautier's famed cough. With this exception, Camille is a catalog of baroque theatrical devices so complete that its banality achieves classic intensity. The speech of the devoted parent to his son's paramour and her heroic answer; the scene between the boulevardier and his mistress when the man she loves is waiting outside the door; the card game, then the duel between the rival lovers; the crisis in which Armand throws a handful of money at Marguerite --these, like everything else in Camille, are things which audiences have seen a thousand times before. Director George Cukor shows why they have been used so often by using them again. They are just as useful for pulverizing susceptible audiences in 1937 as they were in 1852.

Most becoming modern touch in Camille: Cinemactress Garbo's sunburned shoulders. Least becoming is a black hat like a pilgrim's which 'she wears for walking in the country. In the most exacting role of his brief and astonishing career, Cinemactor Robert Taylor gives an assured and competent performance, in which the major flaw for his admirers will no doubt be the fact that it gives him no chance to pose behind the steering wheel of a high-powered roadster.

In Motion Picture Herald'?, list of the biggest moneymaking cinema stars for 1935, Robert Taylor's name was 83rd. In the 1936 list, released last week, he was fourth.* He currently makes $3,500, gets 7,000 letters a week--more mail than any man in the U. S. except President Roosevelt. His real name, Spangler Arlington Brugh, was given him by the osteopath who sired him in Filley, Neb. and sent him to Pomona College, expecting he would become a physician. At Pomona, when Greta Garbo was playing in Mata Hari (1932), adolescent Robert Taylor was acting in the dramatic society. Oliver Hinsdell, coach of MGM's dramatic school, saw him in a Pomona production of Journey's End, gave him a job at $35 a week. At MGM, he got his new name from Producer Louis B. Mayer's secretary, attracted enough attention to get the lead in Broadway Melody of 1936. He was alchemized into one of MGM's major assets by a rival company, when Universal borrowed him for The Magnificent Obsession in 1935. Since then, he has become the cinema's most passionately admired matinee idol since the late Rudolph Valentino.

With Valentino, Taylor shares the distinction of being one of the few cinemactors for whom the use of freight elevators and fire escapes is more of a necessity than an affectation. Crowds often try to pull buttons off his clothes, clip his curls for souvenirs. On his last visit to New York, he lost a shoe in a theatre mob. About half of Robert Taylor's mail comes from young women who find him irresistible as a personification of sex appeal. The other half comes from middle-aged women who want to mother him. Two secretaries answer all his letters. Their employer saves Sundays for autographing the 3,000 pictures requested weekly by admirers.

Robert Taylor lives in a small Beverly Hills house, keeps a Ford coupe for going to work and a Packard convertible for pleasure, has a valet. He wears berets, blue and white checked bathrobes, blue linen beach suits. Last summer, his association with Barbara Stanwyck was the most publicized Hollywood romance of the year outside of Mary Astor's. Currently, the Stanwyck-Taylor partnership, one of the conventions of which was that each gave the other an expensive present every week, is thought to be cooling. Last week, Robert Taylor announced he would travel to Washington with Jean Harlow to watch the inaugural.

As an actor, Robert Taylor is distinguished by a bovine quality to which a mooing voice, a serene gaze and a certain air of incongruous gravity are invaluable contributions. As a character, he is industrious, assured, shrewd, gregarious and psychically well adjusted. His next picture will be The Man in Possession.

The Woman Alone (Gaumont British). Sylvia Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) is unaware that her stolid, bear-faced husband (Oscar Homolka), proprietor of a London cinemansion, is the hireling of a gang of terrorists. While she tends her little brother Stevie, Verloc douses all the lights of London by sabotaging the generators. Next he is ordered to blow up Piccadilly Circus by leaving a bomb in the Underground station. Meanwhile, a handsome Scotland Yarder has him under surveillance, also makes eyes at Sylvia. Unable to leave the house without being detected, Verloc sends Stevie to plant the bomb. Unwitting Stevie dawdles, is blown up on the way. Sylvia then stabs Verloc to death, is about to surrender to the police when another bombing brings everything to the obvious finale.

Adapted from famed Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, The Woman Alone was made by the producers of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Seven Sinners, lacks their top-notch quality.

Crack-Up (Twentieth Century-Fox). Moon-faced Peter Lorre, in his customary capacity of international spy, carries on his customary search for vital government documents, in this case airplane plans also wanted by rival spies. The picture is notable for the skill of Malcolm St. Clair's direction, the neatness with which it avoids embarrassing mention of foreign governments, a conclusion which involves marital infidelity, an airplane crash, gunplay, lunacy and three drownings.

* Motion Picture Herald's stars are picked by exhibitors all over the U. S. who are asked to send in the names of the ten players whose pictures drew most money to their theatres. On this year's lists appeared a total of 207 names.

The winners: 1) Shirley Temple 2) Clark Gable 3) Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers 4) Robert Taylor 5) Joe E. Brown 6) Dick Powell 7) Joan Crawford 8) Claudette Colbert 9) Jeanette MacDonald 10) Gary Cooper Shirley Temple's margin over her nearest rival was bigger this year than last. New names among this year's first ten were Taylor, MacDonald and Cooper. Demoted, to the next group of 15 "honor stars," were James Cagney and Wallace Beery. The late Will Rogers was No. 2 in 1935-

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