The New Pictures

Trader Horn (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The longest, bitterest journey of Trader Horn ended last week at Hollywood's Chinese Theatre. In 1928, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sent two actresses, two actors, Director W. S. Van Dyke and some technicians on an eight-month junket into Africa to shoot the most capricious game of all--an idea. Alfred Aloysius Horn, 75, all-talking hero of Ethelreda Lewis' book, was their theme. Jungle hardships were ameliorated by an ice plant, good food-&-drink, comfortable housing. The real difficulties developed when the film arrived back in California. It would not jell; the script was rewritten endlessly. But last week MGM had its reward.

Incomparably the best jungle picture made so far, Trader Horn will stand, where censors do not gut it, high among the pictures of this or any year. It contains a great deal of savagery, with a love story for sweetening. Trader Horn (oldtime Wild West Cinemactor Harry Carey) and his friend Little Peru find a white native goddess (Edwina Booth), daughter of a deceased missionary. She saves them from being roasted upside down. They flee. Eventually Mr. Carey prudently wraps a blanket around naively nude Miss Booth, sends her on to civilization with Peru, then heads off again into the wilderness.

The producers have given Trader Horn a rather terrifying flavor of reality. Lions kill before your eyes. A man is gored by a rhinoceros. Best performance is given by one Mutia Omoolu, a black gunbearer who returned with the troupe from Africa, lived in a hut on the Metro lot, hated Hollywood.

Mr. Omoolu's compatriots in Africa, according to John McClain, the New York Sun's shipnews reporter who press-agented the picture while it was being made, were of a much happier disposition. When rushes of the film were shown on safari, the natives rolled on the ground with laughter, regardless of the nature of the sequence. At Rhino Town, on the White Nile, Pressagent McClain came upon a tribe of natives all naked save that one of them sported a neat, snap-brim brown hat. Removing the hat, Mr. McClain was surprised to find the label: Brooks Bros.,-- Madison Ave., New York. And although the film shows many a fierce jungle beast, the troupe spent six weeks at $2,000 a day trying to persuade some crocodiles to snap.*

The Gang Buster (Paramount). Funnyman Jack Oakie, ablest of Paramount's comics, here plays a small-town boy so superstitious that on the thirteenth of every month he wants to stay in bed clutching a rabbit's foot. After long and laughable complications he is seen at the picture's climax entering a racketeer's headquarters armed with a monkey wrench to rescue the beautiful kidnapped daughter of a rich lawyer. There is more fun in The Gang Buster than its plot would indicate. Oakie is good and so is William Boyd as Gangster Mike Slade. Best shot: Wynne Gibson as a gangster's moll sending innocent Oakie out to telephone a rival gunman that Slade is paying off his men.

Resurrection (Universal). There are evidences in casting and in the treatment of the opening sequences that Director Edwin Carewe, who made a silent Resurrection with Dolores del Rio, intended this version to be an operetta. In a way it is too bad that he changed his intention to the extent of reducing the musical construction to a few stray bits of song. Making an operetta of one of the most pitiless parables in literature would have set a new high mark for cinematic bathos. John Boles, a typical musicomedy leading man, handsome, colorless and well-voiced, plays the Russian officer who finds himself serving on a jury impaneled to try for murder a prostitute whom, when she was a pretty servant girl, he casually deserted seven years before. The story is told with appreciation of its more obvious theatrical values and a proper subduing of its savage morality. That not much can be done with the characters is less Director Carewe's fault than the fault of Author Leo Tolstoy, who wrote Resurrection in condemnation of the pleasures of the world which he had himself enjoyed and which, in earlier work, he vividly celebrated. Carewe preserves it as Tolstoy wrote it, a heart-rending trad. Technically, Resurrection is brilliant, especially in two sequences: one of acting, when Lupe Velez screams her innocence in the tsarist courtroom; and one of direction, a sequence illustrating the murder where the victim characterizes himself by loud, drunken noises without being seen.

Fighting Caravans (Paramount). Weighed down with local color until it is as top-heavy as one of its covered wagons, lumbering clumsily along a trail already well-worn by similar pictures of pioneering, Fighting Caravans presents lanky Gary Cooper and dynamic Lily Damita making love out-of-doors. He is the brave scout of a wagon train. She is a little French girl whose dying father commanded her with his last words to keep on westward. The suspense consists of mechanical separations of the lovers as they move along and of the question of how the wagon train will be treated by the Indians, with audience sympathy distinctly on the side of the latter. The continuity is broken; the dialog unlikely; the only satisfying element is Lily Damita who still talks with a strong accent and has to have her roles written to allow for this. Silliest shot: the battle with the Indians.

Cimarron (RKO). Edna Ferber's story of the birth and growth of the State of Oklahoma as reflected in the life of a newspaperman and his family was brilliantly cinematic in print and is vivid and memorable journalism as a cinema. It is a long, full-bodied picture, paced so deftly that although it covers more than half a century of crowded, changing events, it never drags and is rarely jerky. Westward goes Richard Dix with his wife (Irene Dunne) to start a newspaper in the town of Osage, Okla., which has sprung into a population of 10,000 in six weeks. He fights the outlawry that has terrorized the clapboard civilization; he establishes himself as the leading citizen of Osage and then disappears because success seems dull to him. He comes back again in a Rough Rider's uniform, goes into court to plead the defence of Estelle Taylor, the town's fanciest lady, whom his wife is about to have punished as a public nuisance; he loses a chance to be governor because he will not connive with politicians who are cheating the Indians out of their oil profits, then disappears again. The last episode, in which he turns up, a wastrel but still a hero, is unnecessarily theatrical, but it is one of the few episodes that can be objected to. Director Wesley Ruggles has smartly used every resource of his medium to make a picture so convincing in its treatment of a little publicized and exciting phase of U. S. expansion that it is valid historical document as well as a fine story.

*African travelers agree that most lions will run if you throw a stone at them.

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