The New Pictures

The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Columbia). A sweet and intelligent young woman whose forbears are New England puritans arrives in Shanghai from the U. S. to marry a handsome and fiery missionary. Two accidents occur. The young lady sees her rickshaw boy brutally run down by a Chinese brigand-general; her marriage ceremony is delayed because the missionary has to rescue six children from an orphanage in besieged Chapei. During the rescue, the young woman is kidnapped by the brigand-general who ran over the coolie. General Yen (Nils Asther) whisks Megan Davis to his summer palace, dresses her in pajamas, holds a mass execution of prisoners-of-war under her bedroom window and makes advances toward her with pagan persistence.

No cinemaddict who has ever heard of Tsar Will Hays should be prepared to guess the outcome of this situation. Megan Davis tries to make a Christian out of General Yen when he is planning to murder a traitorous ex-mistress. He sneers at her attempts, assures her that Christianity is a mumbo-jumbo. To test Megan Davis's sincerity, he offers to accept her as a hostage for the loyalty of his ex-mistress. Miss Davis's Christian faith in the ex-mistress proves to be unjustified. So does her mistrust of General Yen. Having lost his province and his army in giving Miss Davis a chance to prove the efficacy of Christian kindness, he humiliates her for her suspicions of him by the gallantry with which, instead of assaulting her, he sips a cup of poisoned tea. At the end of the picture, Miss Davis is on her way back to Shanghai but not, it appears, to marry her missionary.

Doubtless The Bitter Tea of General Yen will distress cinemaddicts who cherish the illusion that under Tsar Hays the cinema is committed to upholding Occidental theories of right and wrong. Aside from being morally subversive and eloquently antiChristian, it is not an unusual, although it is an intelligent, production. It suffers from lethargic pace, a lack of action elsewhere than in highly atmospheric battle-scenes. Barbara Stanwyck is satisfactory as Megan Davis but the most noteworthy female member of the cast is Toshia Mori, a sloe-eyed Japanese girl whom Director Frank Capra discovered in a Los Angeles curio shop, hired for the part of the ex-mistress.

Island of Lost Souls (Paramount) offers to connoisseurs of acting an opportunity to observe Charles Laughton in the role of a depraved physician who sets up a physiological research station on a remote Pacific isle and comes to a bad end at the claws of a crew of extras made up to resemble subhumans. If the principal role in this garish adaptation of H. G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau had been entrusted to some one else, it might very well have emerged as a routine nightmare, notable mainly for the presence of Paramount's highly publicized but not particularly bestial "panther woman" (Kathleen Burke). Miss Burke, a Chicago dentist's assistant whose pointed face, sloping eyes, fuzzy hair and graceful physique won her the part against 60,000 other girls who entered Paramount's contest for it last summer, pads about the island with the dubious manner natural for an inexperienced actress impersonating a heroine who has no soul. Laughton, as he managed to do in Devil and the Deep and The Sign of the Cross, gives the role of the villain a peculiarly horrifying quality by humanizing it far beyond the demands of the script.

Dr. Moreau is engaged in trying, with partial success, to create humans. His more satisfactory experiments he uses as house servants; the others he allows to roam the forests of his island, so long as they refrain from eating one another or gnawing the bark off trees. When a young castaway (Richard Arlen) turns up at the island, Dr. Moreau regards him as a suitable mate for his artfully constructed "panther woman." The romance progresses nicely until the castaway notices that the panther woman's finger nails are claws. Finally the castaway's fiancee comes to rescue him, accompanied by a drunken sea captain.

Island of Lost Souls is worth seeing particularly for the moments in which Dr. Moreau twitches quietly with pleasure as he allows himself to think what he will cause to happen to the castaway's fiancee when she goes to bed. In Hollywood's current cycle of horror pictures, this one deserves to be rated as much more atrocious than The Mummy (TIME, Jan. 16), a shade less discomforting than last year's Freaks.

No Other Woman (RKO). The trouble with most stories which try to dramatize the machine age is that they seem to have been turned out by machinery. This one, even to the detail of its title, is no exception, although there are moments--like the lively ceremony of a Polack wedding in a Pennsylvania steel town--in which it comes to life. It is the story of a few crucial years in the life of a steel puddler, Jim Stanley (Charles Bickford), and his loving wife, Anna. Jim starts out as a laborer, becomes, for the purposes of the narrative, a steel tycoon almost overnight. In an addled way, he gets involved with a lecherous blonde girl (Gwili Andre) in New York and even tries to divorce his wife to marry her. Suddenly, in court, he experiences a change of heart, admits he has bribed witnesses to testify against his wife, goes to jail for perjury. By the time he gets out, Jim is no longer a tycoon but he still has Anna.

No Other Woman certainly cannot be considered one of the year's most propitious pictures but it is a creditable effort on the part of the company which, in the throes of panting reorganization over a year ago, has since made steps toward recovery. A month ago it appeared that RKO was headed for further reorganization when Production Chief David Oliver Selznick tendered his resignation (TIME, Dec. 26). By last week, Mr. Selznick and RKO's President Benjamin Bertram Kahane were ironing out their difficulties with an agreement which is understood to provide Selznick with a salary of $4,000 a week, and stipulates that he be in complete charge of some 20 RKO productions for 1933, with 20 or so more to be manufactured in accordance with the Selznick "unit plan."

Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (First National) is a dramatization of a book with the same title in which Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing related memoirs and stated theories of prison management. It is hard to believe that Warden Lawes would have committed the indiscretion with which the warden in this picture creates its central situation: allowing a prisoner a holiday from Sing Sing with nothing but the prisoner's promise to guarantee his return. The prisoner (Spencer Tracy) visits his girl (Bette Davis). During his call, she shoots and kills an admirer who has been trying to seduce her. The prisoner is plausibly though unjustly convicted of the murder, sentenced to death.

What makes Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing interesting if not sensational are scenes within the gates of Sing Sing. These will serve to convince cinema audiences that New York jails are far more comfortable places than the Georgia chain gangs which were made horrible in Laughter in Hell and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. In Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing the inmates are allowed to play handball and ask their keepers for cigars. The warden is a humane and clever autocrat who never approaches severity more closely than when he orders an overconfident criminal to pick up a match which he has thrown on the floor.

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