The New Pictures

The Man I Killed (Paramount) is an extraordinary picture for several reasons. One is that the emotion with which it is mainly concerned--contrition--has generally been considered too vague or too rare for cinemaddicts to appreciate, except in its most blatant and trivial forms. Taken from a play by Maurice Rostand, The Man I Kitted presents the case of a hypersensitive French soldier who, when the War is over, is tortured by remembering a young German whom he stabbed to death in the trenches. Just how this grisly recollection affects the Frenchman becomes clear when a priest, to whom he has confessed his deed as though it were a crime, reassures him by pointing out that he has merely done his duty. "Duty?" says the bewildered Frenchman, "why is it my duty to kill?" Eventually he goes to the German village of Falsburg-un-Baden and to an address which he had read on the last letter of the man he killed. There he finds the parents of the German soldier, but he cannot bring himself to tell them what he did to their son. Instead, he puts flowers on the son's grave, falls in love with the son's fiancee, plays Traumerei on the son's violin.

The obvious problem which confronted Director Ernst Lubitsch was how to make moving pictures tell a story in which not the actions of the characters but the dark violence of their thoughts was the important matter. His dialog writers did not help him much and there are probably actors who would have done better as the remorseful Frenchman than Phillips Holmes, though the part is well adapted to Holmes's technique of behaving as though in a quandary at all times. Lionel Barrymore as the father of the dead German acts magnificently and so far out of his ordinary manner that he is almost unrecognizable. But credit for making an effective cinema belongs to Director Lubitsch.

The creative skill which used to show in the suave touches which Lubitsch put into his comedies comes out here in other directions--a shot of marching feet for which the camera was placed just behind a one-legged soldier; doorbells ringing in the Falsburg shops as the shopkeepers come out to watch a Frenchman going down the street; a gravedigger telling the German boy's fiancee (Nancy Carroll) that a Frenchman stopped to speak to him and gave him a tip.

Son of a Berlin shopkeeper, Ernst Lubitsch was made to work in his father's store while he learned enough about acting to get a job with Max Reinhardt. In 1913 he performed in cinema for the first time, liked it so much he never went back to the stage. He went to Hollywood to direct Mary Pickford in Rosita nine years ago, after making himself and Pola Negri famous with Gypsy Blood, Montmartre, One Arabian Night and Du Barry (called Passion in the U. S.).

Short, swarthy, scowling, Director Lubitsch has a Teutonic sense of humor, a juvenile propensity for jokes. When visitors appear on the set, he amuses him self by roaring at the leading lady. He gaily chose to address Jeanette MacDonald by abbreviating her last name, until she replied in kind. More Teutonic than his humor is the Lubitsch urge for order and completion. Before making a picture he spends three months preparing the script with his writers, telling them exactly what he wants. When the script -- essentially a stenographic record of a Lubitsch idea -- is finished, he seldom sees it, for he knows it all by heart. In staff conferences, he is charmed to argue over details, pleased when a costumer asks advice about a button on the hero's coat. With his actors -- whom he has usually selected long before he casts them -- he expostulates one by one, a day for each, until they share to the last shade his reading of their parts. When the picture starts, he almost never changes anything.

When someone tells him he has made a clumsy sequence, Lubitsch says, "I wanted it that way," trumps up a complicated reason. He says: "I discard rules in making pictures. . . . Whatever fits best, I use."

Actors who might resent his arrogance in any less intelligent director, are pleased by his intuitive appreciation. Saturated in the cinema, Lubitsch diverts himself, when not making real pictures, by making a cast out of his friends, his servants, the people who pass him on the street. "Ach," he says, "you are a crook. No, you are head of a gang of blackmailers. . . . You know everything, everybody." Pleased at his prowess in such conceits, he assumes a wise expression and rolls his eyes -- the cameras for an endless hypothetical scenario.

No One Man (Paramount). Through tedious scenes of polo, parties and Palm Beach, this picture (from Rupert Hughes's novel) indicts the shallow rich. Penelope Newbold (Carole Lombard), seeking the 100% husband, has divorced one 60 per-center, is engaged to Bill Hanaway (Ricardo Cortez), a "sportsman," quoted about 70. Seeing Bill with Sue (Juliette Compton) in his arms, Penelope marks him down 30 points and elopes with a Viennese doctor who runs a sanitorium for wayward girls. Bill follows, wins her, conveniently dies from heart disease attributable to alcoholism, athletic and sexual excesses; and Penelope, proving her worth by nursing in the sanitorium, is promoted to doctor's wife. The dialog is ridiculous but adequate for the plot. Individually the players deserve mention for their fortitude.

Cock of the Air (Howard Hughes), which was vigorously censored before release, emerges as a not particularly happy Wartime farce in which Chester Morris, as a scatter-brained aviator, jokes with, flies with, drinks with, wrestles with and finally suggests matrimony with Billie Dove, as a Parisian actress, whose costume armor is heard clanking to the floor at the end of the picture. Typical shot: Chester Morris squirting seltzer at Billie Dove when she slaps him for an improper proposal.

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