The New Pictures

General Crack (Warner). A fairly successful effort has been made to bring speed and glitter to this costume romance. It has all been expertly tailored for John Barrymore's profile, for his bark, his meditative scowl, his glance of an amorous lion, his strides in high, patent-leather boots. On a white charger he leads his mercenaries into battle and pushes back with long, stiffened fingers the cloaks attached to various 18th Century uniforms. He is a soldier of fortune who earns his living fighting wars for popinjay princes and who takes a dislike to his current employer because of a remark the latter has passed about his (Crack's) mother. Best shot: Crack, at the battle front, making sissified King Leopold (Lowell Sherman) drop a handkerchief as a signal for shooting an officer.

Untamed (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Any picture acted by so handsome a young woman as Joan Crawford is not hard to watch, even one so foolish as Untamed. There were possibilities of satire in the idea of a girl brought up in a South American jungle becoming a social success in a modern U. S. city. These possibilities were neglected; Untamed becomes a routine, highly improbable love story built around the man Miss Crawford meets on the boat coming north. Except for a song in The Hollywood Revue, it is the first time her voice has been photographed. She sings with a deep, throaty twang; even her mutterings as Bingo, the jungle girl, do not spoil the effect of her natural vivacity and physical outlines. Silliest shot: fistfight between Bingo's sweetheart and another suitor in a ballroom during a fashionable party.

The New Babylon (Amkino). In mood and technique, this makes pictures like General Crack look like amateur theatricals, but it is inferior as entertainment. The difference is a matter of intention. The Amkino producers were not interested in making this product salable but in expressing a dogma passionately clear and important to the patriots of new Russia. The setting in France of 1870 is adventitious. The storyless argument lacks sequence. The vivid symbolism, used at first coherently to show what happened in the rebellion that followed the German invasion, becomes disordered and tedious. Best shot: French troops stimulated to attack doomed rebels by the ironical singing of "La Marseillaise."

Caucasian Love (Amkino). There is further angry propaganda in this one, directed now at the Cossacks whom the Tsar sent to drive the people of Tersk out of their village. The situation is presented less consciously and vehemently than in The New Babylon (see above). Good shots: the illiterate Chechens signing a document by pressing it with thumbs first rubbed on a sooty pot; a crowd of people on a mountain road; villagers squatting with bowed heads in the road as they await a charge by cavalry.

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