The New Pictures

Nana (United Artists) is Emile Zola's story about a Parisian gutter-lily, gilded by Samuel Goldwyn. When first seen Nana (Anna Sten) is a scrubgirl, soapily eager to be glamorous and rich. As a first step toward this goal she pushes a drunken soldier into the troutpool of a sidewalk cafe. Her act so delights an impressionable theatrical manager (Richard Bennett) with Belasco manners and Minsky talent, that he makes her his mistress, teaches her to be a torchsinger.

Nana falls in love with a feverish young lieutenant named Muff at (Phillips Holmes), whose older brother (Lionel Atwill), a pompous colonel, considers her a "gilded fly." But after he has sent his young brother to Algiers to cool off, Colonel Muffat starts pawing Nana for himself. By the time Lieutenant Muffat returns to Paris, the Franco-Prussian War has started, Nana has become a tosspot and Colonel Muffat has left his home to live with her. The brothers meet in the hall of Nana's house. They start to draw their swords. But since the point of the story is that Nana, although troublesome, is nice, they do not use them. Nana inconspicuously shoots herself. Dying, she makes the two Muffats shake hands. ". . . I was born," she says, "all wrong. . . ."

Like most Goldwyn pictures, Nana was far more expensive than the finished product would suggest. As released this week it represents an investment of about $1,000,000. Anna Sten had to be taught English before production could begin. A version of the picture directed by George Fitzmaurice was scrapped, after being two-thirds finished, because it was over-conscientiously acted. As a build-up for Anna Sten United Artists launched a lavish advertising campaign consisting of daily newspaper "teasers"--Sten portraits with no text except her name and one word to describe her varying expressions ("Mysterious," "Fascinating," "Glamorous," "Worldly," "Captivating"). Last week Greek Catholic Archpriest Nicholas Kedroff, Dean of St. Nicholas Russian Cathedral in Manhattan, led his congregations in a prayer that Anna Sten's first U. S. production would be successful. His piety and Producer Goldwyn's extravagance were misplaced. Nana is sad but spurious and stodgy. All that saves it from complete mediocrity is Anna Sten who, although her accent is still outlandish, is a cheery, wise and personable importation from Russia. Unlike most European cinemactresses, she is interesting without seeming morbid.

Anna Sten (real name Anjuschka Stenski) was born in Kiev in 1910. Her father was a Russian dancer. Her mother was a Swede. Anna Sten became a movie actress at 15. Since then the principal complications of her career have been linguistic.

After making The Yellow Ticket in Moscow, she went to Berlin, played the lead in Terra Film's production of The Brothers Karamazov. Then she made a French version of the same picture in two weeks. Her first performance in The Brothers Karamazov prompted Samuel Goldwyn to offer her a contract. When she arrived in the U. S. in April 1932, with her architect husband Dr. Eugene Franke, Anna Sten was subjected to intensive "Americanization" by Producer Goldwyn. She got $1,500 a week for doing practically nothing. She had U. S. tutors, servants, clothes, car & friends. She was not permitted to speak to newshawks lest "flaws" show in her behavior. After one year of grooming, Anna Sten was considered sufficiently "American" to perform as a Parisian demimondaine.

She now lives at Santa Monica in a many-windowed modern house designed by her husband, drives home every day in her 1933 black Ford coupe for a lunch of borsch, shashlik & cognac. Her next role will be (Katusha) in Resurrection.

Beloved (Universal) is the lachrymose life history of Carl Hausmann (John Boles). At ten he is a Viennese violin virtuoso. At 20 he is a music teacher in Charleston, S. C. in love with one of his pupils (Gloria Stuart). After the Civil War he marries her. He cannot get his symphonies played and his son turns out to be a loafer. Finally as an old man Carl Hausmann has one more cross to bear. His grandson, whom he adores, has inherited not only his talent for composing but his ear for Schmalzmusik. When poor old Carl Hausmann totters into publishers' offices with his symphonies, he is accused of plagiarizing his grandson's successful jazz.

Life history is often a successful pattern for the cinema. Like many of its predecessors, Beloved contains strong sentiment and the appearance of sincerity. But when Carl Hausmann finally gets his symphony played in Carnegie Hall, he is such a battered old wreck that it all seems hardly worth while.

Four Frightened People (Paramount) is really two frightened pictures--first a parody of jungle adventure and then a jungle adventure itself. The shot that punctuates the change is one of Claudette Colbert losing her glasses and thereby discovering that she is beautiful.

Before that, she has been a Chicago geography teacher, escaping from a plague-ridden tourist boat through a Malay jungle in the company of a bombastic reporter (William Gargan), a woman birth control propagandist (Mary Boland) and a diffident chemist (Herbert Marshall). The birth-control enthusiast is left as hostage with a tribe of natives to whose warriors her precepts are an unwelcome benefit.

The geography teacher begins to realize that the reporter is less heroic than she had supposed and the chemist much more likable, but neither of them really notices her.

By losing her glasses and discovering her glamour, the geography teacher becomes, according to the gallant code of Director Cecil Blount De Mille, a person to be taken seriously. The rest of Four Frightened People is therefore a routine jungle uproar, full of radiator squeakings, poisoned arrows, hairbreadth escapades and swampland romance. Typical shot: Claudette Colbert washing in a waterfall.

Hips, Hips, Hooray (RKO). "Frisby's Beauty Products" is another business enterprise in which girls sing, dance and tub. The opulent proprietress (Thelma Todd) and a pretty salesgirl (Dorothy Lee) meet two preposterous persons (Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey) who sell flavored lipstick. They dance a lively ballet in a stranger's office, plug a pleasant song: "Keep On Doin' What You're Doin.' " Admirers of the agonized smile of small Wheeler and the brisk dignity of cigar-chewing Woolsey will relish the automobile race which they win after a cyclone whirls them up into the snow-covered Rockies.

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