The New Pictures

The Last Command (Emil Jannings) is the story of a cousin to the late Russian Tsar who, after the fume and flames of the revolution,, found his way to the dreary door-steppes of a Hollywood studio.

The plot of the picture goes back to what he remembers, sitting in the cinema dressing room over a makeup table. He remembers himself as General Dolgorucki, a gaudy young officer, commander-in-chief of the Tsar's army. Two revolutionists come to this young officer to have their passports examined; a beautiful actress and her friend, a young theatre manager. The Tsar's cousin sends the man to prison for an impertinence and asks the girl to have dinner with him.

The revolt of the peasants finds General Dolgorucki in the coal car of a railroad train, where taunting revolutionists are making him expiate his onetime pride and arrogance. Saved by the girl, he jumps off the train in time to see the long line of cars, one of which contains his dearly beloved, crash through a broken bridge into drowned and dismal wreckage.

Shaking his head over this recollection, General Dolgorucki sees his face in the mirror over the dressing-room table. The cinema director, whom he recognizes as the revolutionist he sent to prison so long ago, gives him a costume like the one he wore when he was the cousin of a living Tsar. Then the director sends the sad actor, once more a gaudy captain, into a mock battle. Leading Hollywood soldiers across a fabricated battlefield, the Russian nobleman forgets pretense. After relieving for a moment a similar scene in his remembrance, General Dolgorucki dies, not in pretense but in actuality, on his lips the ironic question of a disabled college athlete, "Did we win?"

Despite the romantic frenzy of this tragedy, whose faults are far more obvious in synopsis than in cinematic entirety, The Last Command is indubitably a powerful film. Clumsy-faced, blacksmith-muscled, thick-fingered Emil Jannings, the thoroughly unhandsome hero, is the most finished, the most subtle cinemactor in the U.S. He does everything slowly; smiles break across his face like a gradual sunrise, his sorrows have accumulated intensity. In this picture, he is ably supported by lords, soldiers, peasants, and most notably by Evelyn Brent who is the heroine.

In actuality, Cinemactor Jannings was no cousin of the Tsar before he appeared upon the screen. He was a member of famed Max Reinhardt's theatrical troupe, played Shakespearean repertory as now presented in Manhattan. He was persuaded to appear in the cinema by famed director Ernst Lubitsch, a onetime stock-company companion, then with a German film company. He has since pleased with performances in Faust, The Way of All Flesh, Variety.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. So bland and calm was the satire of Author Anita Loos' famed opus, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that, when translated into cinematic dialect, it seemed probable that only a faint echo of its hilarity would remain. Such is not the case. Ruth Taylor as the very arch criminal, Lorelei Lee, is so coy, and cogently appealing that it becomes easy to believe in her conquest first of the vulgar but munificent Mr. Eisman, then of the wan but even more wealthy Henry Spoffard. Dorothy Shaw, the hard-boiled bantam brunette who assists the capricious avarice of Lorelei, is neatly played by Alice White. It would have seemed not incredible had their jaunt to Paris, underwritten by Mr. Eisman to further the already astonishingly complete education of his two proteges, resulted in the complete rehabilitation of the French franc.

Culled from the grim pages of Author Loos's comedy, the subtitles have the brilliance and at least part of the durability of a diamond bracelet, which, as Lorelei Lee remarked in a wisecrack which has since been heard around the world, will last forever. Altogether, in its slyly sympathetic exposition of gold-digging as a fine art, the picture has precisely the delicious flavour of its literary model.

Wife Savers. Once more Wallace Beery and Raymond Hatton cavort foolishly together, this time in a small Alpine village. Its inhabitants, with the exception of one beautiful girl, find their presence highly disagreeable. Wallace Beery becomes an Alpine guide, a profession in which his efforts are ludicrously insufficient. As Now We're in the Air at one point descended to extraordinarily vulgar farce, so Wife Savers allows its plot to depend upon a somewhat ribald interpretation of a note, written by the heroine, in which she informs the hero that he will have to marry her because she is in trouble. Wallace Beery also confesses in a subtitle that he is not to blame for having been born a month too soon. Wife Savers, despite or perhaps on account of such careless coarseness, is quite consistently laughable.

The Divine Woman is another vehicle for the extraordinarily tempestuous passions of Actress Greta Garbo. She plays the part of Marianne, a little country girl who completely eclipses a courtesan mother by becoming the greatest actress in Paris. But even when bouquets, floral and financial, come raining down around her, she cannot forget Lucien, who, because he deserted his regiment to be near Marianne, has been put into prison.