The New Pictures

The Virginian (Paramount). High on any list of famed moments in U. S. literature and drama is that scene in which Owen Wister's hero, insulted by an epithet* which this cinema clearly records, draws himself up and says with flashing eye: "When you call me that, smile." If you have not read the book or seen one of the plays or pictures made from it for some time you will be surprised to find that The Virginian would be a typical western except that it is less energetic and far better bred than most westerns--a nice library arrangement of the earnest hero, the fragile heroine, the cattle-rustling, halfbreed badman. Around these puppets the beautiful photography is like a shell on whose glazed surface you can see reflected the arch of a great horizon and which, pressed to your ear, records the rustle of the air's phantom oceans over the prairie land, sounds of rivers, birds, hoofs. Best shots: the steers in the rapids; three cattle-rustlers hanged, with horses for a scaffold; the shooting match between the Virginian (Gary Cooper) and the halfbreed (Walter Huston).

The Royal Box (Warner). A Frenchman's play about an English actor is now translated into German, so that famed Alexander Moissi can play it. But The Royal Box was not made in Germany but at Flatbush, N. Y. in the old Vitagraph studio where the late John Bunny and the Talmadge girls did their first work. It is Dumas' story of how Edmund Kean insulted the Prince of Wales from the stage because the Prince had made Kean's beloved sit in the Royal Box at a performance of Hamlet. Moissi rants in his best manner, letting out the exotic and flexible tones which have made his reputation on the Continent, but even audiences who know German well will have trouble understanding him, so badly timed is the recording. At the Manhattan premiere of this picture the lounge of the Fifth Avenue Playhouse was fixed up like a German beer-garden and the patrons were served with near-beer and pretzels. Good shots: "Sein oder nicht sein" ("To be or not to be") and "Ach, armer Yorick" soliloquies.

Alexander Moissi's Italian mother taught him her tongue without much opposition from his Albanian father, so he still speaks German with a faint trill in his r's and an insufficient guttural. In Trieste he went to the only Italian Real-gymnasium where the pupils did not have to learn Latin and Greek. His ancestors had all been solid people, merchants, physicians, even one general, but he decided to be an actor. After a while in stock, he convinced Max Reinhardt that he was a good actor, thus adding to Reinhardt's reputation for "discovering" talent. He now lives near Vienna, has no definite nationality just as he has no permanent working-place. By race and by profession Moissi is an actor, a person whose fixation it is to have no fixations. He dislikes contracts and travels around Europe playing guest engagements at capital cities. He wears loose ties and velvet jackets, keeps pets, plays all his roles with a facile and sonorous emotionalism which does not seem to have its source in the ideas of his authors. He has played Shaw, Hauptmann, Chekhov, Pirandello, Shakespeare Euripides. When he played Redemption in Manhattan (TIME, Nov. 26, 1928) Commentator Alexander Woollcott called his voice "the most extraordinary ever heard in the theatre" and Robert Littell said of his acting: "It is a gorgeous bag of tricks . . . it is not a performance. . . ."

*In Wister's text, "son-of-a----."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.