The New Pictures

Tycoon (RKO Radio) pictures the U.S. ideal of manhood as a construction engineer (John Wayne) who, like the steam shovel he strongly resembles, works all right when he is building things. But he looks absurd trying to speak English or kiss a girl. The U.S. ideal of villainy is represented in this movie as a Latin American rail magnate (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) who dresses for dinner, manages a compound sentence without stuttering, and tries to keep his lovely daughter (Laraine Day) from getting hitched to a steam shovel.

The film may have some suspense for Latin Americans, who conceivably will have difficulty believing that censors would permit such a marriage. For U.S. moviegoers, Tycoon has Technicolor.

The Eternal Return (Paulve; Discina). The medieval bards sang of Tristan and Iseult as huge, cloudy symbols of high romance; later storytellers (Swinburne, Wagner, Tennyson, E. A. Robinson et al.) further enriched (or corrupted) the tale with new ideas and idioms. Now the French poet-moviemaker, Jean Cocteau, has handsomely reset the legend in modern dress. His title, The Eternal Return, is the term Nietzsche gave to the mournfully romantic doctrine of endless historical repetition. The Nietzschean note tolls through the film like a sunken bell.

Cocteau has transformed (with much historical irony) almost all of the serpentine story. The Cocteau version is about a young blood named Patrick (Jean Marais), who runs off with his Uncle Mark's blonde, beautiful wife, Nathalie (Madeleine Sologne).

Cocteau has cleverly managed to waken the body of the legend to 20th Century life without rousing its spirit from medieval slumbers. His rattling flivvers and gleaming bathrooms are woven into the fine fabric of the ancient Tristan and Iseult legend like bright new threads into a shadowy old tapestry.

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