The New Pictures

Marx Bros. At The Circus (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) checks the recent decline in Marx Brothers' pictures with two of their fastest, funniest sequences--a riotous Newport society and circus climax, and Groucho doing a combination rumba, tango and nautch dance with one pant leg kitten-ishly hoisted while he sings of his tattooed lost love, Lydia that Encyclopedia.

She can give you a view of the world in tattoo

If you step up and tell her where.

For a dime you can see Kankakee or Paree,

Or Washington crossing the Delaware,

Oh Lydia, oh, Lydia, say have you met Lydia,

Oh Lydia, The Tattooed Lady;

When her muscles start relaxin'

Up the hill comes Andrew Jackson. . . .

For two bits she will do a Mazurka in Jazz,

With a view of Niag'ra that no artist has,

And on a clear day you can see Alcatraz,

You can learn a lot from Lydia.*

The fun is complicated by Groucho's efforts to extract $10,000 from Mrs. Dukesbury (Margaret Dumont, stately stooge of the Marxes), a Newport dowager. Groucho, who has never seen Mrs. Dukes-bury before, barges into her boudoir, woos her with this Marxian dialectric: "Those June nights on the Riviera . . . and that night I drank champagne from your slipper --two quarts." The big scene is the party for the 400. "Judge Chanock," says Mrs. Dukesbury graciously, "will sit on my left hand, you (to Groucho) will sit on my right hand." "How will you eat," cracks Groucho, "through a tube?"

At The Circus is funny, should have been funnier. But cinemarxists, as they rest up from more laughs than the Marx Brothers have given them in many a long picture, may agree that the Marxes are still U. S. comedy trio No. 1, even if, as Namesake Karl Marx said of John Stuart Mill, their "eminence is due to the flatness of the surrounding country."

Beasts of Berlin (Producers Pictures Corp.). In the windy March of 1918 Manhattan's flag-wrapped Broadway Theatre flaunted an announcement: "WARNING: Any person throwing mud at this poster will not be prosecuted." The poster advertised a new thriller: The Kaiser, Beast of Berlin. Inside the theatre, girl ushers, togged out as Belgian peasants, distributed programs which promised "an amazing expose of the intimate life of the Mad Dog of Europe." The picture did not quite live up to the promise. It described the hardships and eventual victory of the conquered Belgians. Hero was the original Tarzan, big, soft-looking Elmo Lincoln, playing a blacksmith into whose custody the captured Kaiser (Rupert Julian) was given after the War. The late Lon (Man of a Thousand Faces) Chaney played walrus-whiskered Admiral von Tirpitz, as mild-looking a Santa Claus as ever ordered an ocean liner spurlos versenkt (sunk without trace).

With World War II it was surer than shellfire that somebody would brush the dust off this old scarehead. A small new company brought the title up to date as Hitler, the Beast of Berlin, tacked it to a film about the horrors of concentration camps. The picture might have been spurlos versenkt itself had not worried Director Irwin Esmond-of N. Y. State's Education Department (Motion Picture Division) called it "inhuman, sacrilegious and tending to incite to crime." New York censors promptly banned it, almost as quickly reversed their ban after the title was changed to Beasts of Berlin, some 67 feet were cut out of the film. Soon in other States bans and okays flew as thick as autumn leaves. By last week New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and the citizens of Detroit, Mich, might see the picture. Ohioans, Virginians and the citizens of Chicago and Providence, R. I., emphatically might not. Reason: banning censors claimed the film was bare-faced propaganda tending to stir up national hatreds.

Those who saw the picture found it far less thrilling as propaganda than interesting as a clue to the mental aberration known as censor's mind. The film is a dullish cinematizing of Shephard Traube's weakish story, Goose Step, portraying the sufferings in a concentration camp of a group of anti-Nazis of no particular politics. Most of them are finally released. Their leader (Roland Drew) escapes with no more trouble than it takes to run across a field to a hay cart, finds it just as easy to rejoin his wife (Steffi Duna) in Switzerland.

Beastliest bits: a flogging, a Nazi rowdy trampling a crucifix.

We Are Not Alone (Warner Bros.) is a somewhat overlengthy, overwordy picturizing of James Hilton's cheery little novel of that name in which the only two pleasant characters get hanged. As an absent-minded young doctor in a small English village, Paul Muni (with a phony English accent) has a chance to act in mufti for a change, instead of doing one of those great impersonations (Pasteur, Zola, Juarez) in which he is aided by overmetic-ulous makeup and fussy mimicry. The doctor spends most of his spare time trying to keep his strict, pious, headachy wife (Flora Robson) from nagging their high-strung son into a nerve clinic. When the wife agrees to employ an Austrian dancer-patient of the doctor's (Jane Bryan, with a phony Viennese accent) as the boy's companion, all their troubles seem about over.

But no: the wife takes headache tablets which her frightened son inadvertently mixes up with poison after breaking a poison bottle. The doctor and the Austrian girl are held for murder. Sentenced to be hanged, he is comforted by the thought that other people find most disturbing: "Death is not the worst thing we have to face, only the last."

* By permission of Leo Feist Inc.

* Not to be confused with Columbia University's philosopher-pedagogue Irwin Edman.

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