The New Pictures

The Big Pond (Paramount). This is another film that has been tailored--far less elaborately than The Love Parade--to the measure of Maurice Chevalier. It is successful because of Chevalier's ability to convince his audiences that he enjoys what he is doing and because of his superb skill at singing the "intimate" type of revue ballad. The story is about a Frenchman who makes his mark in the chewing-gum business so as to win a U. S. millionaire's daughter--Claudette Colbert. With the plot keyed a little lower and a chorus thrown in The Big Pond could easily have been turned into a musical comedy. As it stands it is good program entertainment, but not adequate for Chevalier's talents. Best song: "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me."

The Divorcee (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Whether the success of Ex-Wife, the novel from which this picture is adapted, was due to its frankness on sex, or to a certain distinct and half-naive pathos in its sophisticated affectations, will make little difference to people who see The Divorcee. The film accurately reproduces all the qualities of the book, including its disorder and its occasional approach to burlesque, but Norma Shearer's beauty makes it worth watching in spite of mediocre dialog. It concerns a young couple whose happiness was disrupted because they had a habit of confessing their in fidelities to each other and who were re united only after the wife had had a lively succession of affairs with men of various nationalities. Its interpretation of an elastic moral standard, toned down to conventional cinematic metaphors, will have a less disturbing effect on young people than settings which create the idea that Manhattan newspapermen and women live in gaudy luxury and have little to do beyond gratifying their amatory whims. Best shot: an automobile accident which has little to do with the story.

The Silent Enemy (Burden-Chanler). Every schoolboy knows that the Indian has not yet quite vanished from the forests of the continent that was his. But no schoolbook, museum or government bureau will ever preserve the vestigial red man as this picture does. Few professionals could have made such a picture, nor could they quite destroy it with commercial cutting and retouching after the effort and money lavished upon it by courageous amateurs. It is the work of William Douglas Burden and William C. Chanler, a young Harvard combination. From boyhood Burden has known the forests of Canada. The cast was recruited from the Ojibwas of upper Ontario, with old Chief Yellow Robe of the Sioux, who three years ago inducted Chief White Eagle Coolidge into that tribe, and who this spring died a city death of pneumonia (TIME, April 21), Princess Spotted Elk of the Penobscots, and young Chief Long Lance of the Blackfoot tribe, author, boxer, wrestler and onetime West Pointer, to play the leads. Burden and Chanler spent ten months on wilderness location to obtain a realism so striking that Paramount, which released The Silent Enemy last week, complained: "People will never believe it." Accordingly, a six-hour epic has been cut to 90 minutes. But it is still epic.

The time is before Columbus. A famine year is upon the forest. Baluk, the tribe's big-muscled hunter, reports to Chetoga, the old chief, that their people should go "many moccasins" north without delay to the crossing place of the caribou. Dagwan, the malicious medicine man, makes it a condition of the plan that if game is not found, Baluk must die. Dagwan's desires are the chieftainship and Chetoga's doe-eyed daughter Neewa.

The north wind and great snows meet the Ojibwas on their march. The Great Canoe (Death) comes for Chetoga. "The land of the little sticks" (Hudson Bay barrens) is reached and Baluk posts sentinels. But the caribou are not seen.

"What shall be the manner of your death?" sneers Dagwan.

"I go not like a dog struck in the ribs," retorts Baluk, "but like a chief of the Ojibwas. Let the squaws prepare the funeral pyre!"

The flames mount. Baluk, his stoic face agonized, lays by his tom-tom and draws his robe over his head in the inferno. But then the sentinels' signal fires flare. Baluk is dragged off the pyre still alive to lead the tribe against the milling, trampling, stampeding, incredible game herd. Dagwan is sent away for "the slow death" (starvation) while the tribe feasts and laughs and toboggans. The silent enemy, Hunger, snarls his defeat from the lowering arctic storm-scud.

Best shots: Chetoga's lonely vigil to appease the Manitou; the fall of a great pine, symbolizing Chetoga's death; un-faked closeups of deer, wolverines, 75,000 caribou; a bear and mountain lion fighting; the wolf pack trying to hamstring, then Baluk spearing, a bull moose.

Temple Tower (Fox). This is an attempted sequel to Bulldog Drummond, a picture hailed by critics as one of the best crook stories ever filmed. Temple Tower is silly, complicated. Kenneth McKenna, a slim and boyish sleuth who dresses in dinner clothes and an opera hat even while staying in a town defined by the local innkeeper as "the loneliest place in England," is engaged in tracking down an elderly emerald thief who lives in a tower equipped with bloodhounds, secret passages, a beautiful girl, and a masked hunchback with a penchant for strangling people with his bare hands. Typical shot: the criminal-in-chief dropping a rebellious henchman through a trapdoor into quicksand.

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