The New Pictures

All Quiet on the Western Front

(Universal). This picture would never have flashed and chattered from a screen if, as a book, it had not sold so plentifully. It is sprawly narrative, lacking a great climactic situation, lacking a love story. But it was artistic and immensely profitable. Also, it was German. Producer Carl Laemmle and his son Junior are German. They control Universal Pictures. They purchased and produced All Quiet.

They hired for the job Lewis Milestone, a chunky Russian who once worked in a raincoat factory; whose high character and uncompromising ability have made him notable among cinema directors. They hired to prepare the film manuscript Maxwell Anderson (What Price Glory, Saturday's Children) and George Abbott (Broadway, Coquette). These three sat down not to dramatize the book, but to translate it. Flouting formula they retained the spirit of the novel.

They wrote and Mr. Milestone photographed the story of German schoolboys who went to war. There they met Hunger. They met and grew to worship a guttural, tough comrade called Kat. They met nerve-tearing bombardment, lice, pain. They met three French girls by swimming a river after nightfall. One by one they met Death.

From such grisly materials the popular cinema is rarely drawn. The film is monumental in the courage that risked its manufacture.

Brutal, brilliant battle scenes dominate the action. Preeminent in the cast is Louis Wolheim as Kat. Best shot: Raymond Griffith (silk hat comedian) as the bloody, bearded French poilu stabbed to death in a shell hole.

Last week Hollywood donned emeralds and ermine and flocked to the world premiere of All Quiet. Afterward Hollywood went to Junior Laemmle's dancing party at The Embassy, formidably exclusive club of high cinema society. Lavish was its praise of Junior's picture. But privately it whispered professional misgivings. It whispered that the picture was too long; that it was too gloomy for the general taste; that the novelty of war pictures was gone. The true trouble was that All Quiet had been injudiciously heralded as the great epic of the War. Courageous and vivid as it was, the audience did not find it, of its kind, as startling as The Big Parade. All Quiet is a freak, almost a monstrosity among pictures.

When he was 17 Director Louis Milestone ran away from the German school where his Russian parents had sent him, migrated to the U. S., got a job in a raincoat factory at $4 per week. Later he became handy man for a theatrical photographer, and learned more about photography in the U. S. Signal Corps during the War. The day before he was discharged he won $300 in the company craps game and while spending it on Broadway met a cinema producer who gave him a $20 job in his cutting room. He became cutting room editor, then wrote some scenarios, got into directing. When he found that Warner Bros, who paid him $400 a week, were getting $1,000 when they lent him to other companies, he quit work and went through bankruptcy to settle the company's suit for $200,000 damages. Directing All Quiet on the Western Front he was knocked unconscious by a piece of plaster blown from a dynamited church. He is fat, witty, a brilliant organizer. Some of his pictures: The Garden of Eden, The Racket, The Betrayal.

Free and Easy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Producers used to be opposed to stories using the moving-picture business as a background, believing, probably quite correctly, that such stories in attempting to exploit the accidental glamour which is one of the most important assets of the business, satisfied public curiosity instead of stimulating it. This time the idea of having the camera follow Buster Keaton around the Culver City lot, where famed directors and entertainers are at work, is more successful than usual. It is a Merton-of-the-Movies story, with the comedian talking in a mellow voice that takes only a little sharpness out of his pantomime. Best shot: Keaton, cast as a messenger in a historical drama, trying to deliver the line: "The queen has swooned."

High Society Blues (Fox). How little Janet Gaynor's success in character studies of wistfully romantic young girls depended on physical attractiveness is illustrated by this unsuccessful musicomedy. Her coy little voice and frail attempts to assume the spontaneity and vitality proper to a prima donna never give the story what it needs. It is all about a rich young girl who was supposed to marry a count she did not love and who finally eloped with Charles Farrell in a white Ford. Silliest line (by Farrell, after a tedious love-scene spent entirely in singing the theme-song, "Just Like in a Story Book"): "Let's not ever forget this beautiful memory."

Hold Everything (Warner). This uninspired reproduction of a good old show will be enjoyed by everybody who passed last year in such isolation that he escaped hearing, on radios, phonographs and pianolas, such songs as "You're the Cream in My Coffee." Georges Carpentier is in it. He has to sing sometimes, but he also puts on a flashy two-round bout with a light heavy named Tony Stabenau which is undoubtedly the best piece of fighting ever done in a revue. Best shot: an old gag from silent pictures in which, after taking a blow on the jaw in a farce bout with a fighter not mentioned on the program, Comedian Joe E. Brown bounces across the ring from one set of ropes to the other as though each set were a catapult.

Paramount on Parade. This is one of those elaborate miscellanies with which the big production companies utilize the spare time of the stars on contract to them. It is an unusually good one--rapid, handsome, brightened with flashes of wit probably put in by Elsie Janis, who supervised it. After Leon Errol has put on a hilarious act on a hospital cot, trying to roll himself into a three-quarter blanket, the audience is informed that he was just "dying to introduce the next sketch." The usual parodies include a mystery story with Clive Brook as Sherlock Holmes and William Powell as Philo Vance, and Harry Green singing something called "I'm Isidore, the Toreador." Best sketch: Maurice Chevalier and Evelyn Brent in The Origin of the Apache.

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