Short of the Week

Climax of the second monthly installment of The March of Time, out last week, is a series of swift international shots showing Europe drawing an iron ring around Adolf Hitler. While the German Realmleader broods in his Bavarian hideaway, marching men in Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, Russia tramp a stern significance into the warning words of statesmen. Besides a visual integration of a taut European situation, this March of Time edition contains: 1) the dramatic crisis in the office of the New York Daily News on the night of the Hauptmann verdict; 2) an electric light bulb breaking, milk dropping into a pan, photographed by a camera 150 times faster than the human eye; 3) the crash of the Mohawk and Talisman off the New Jersey shore; 4) the story of Convict Huddie Ledbetter ("Lead Belly") whose Negro songs get him pardoned for murder.

The first March of Time (TIME, Feb. 4) aroused critical excitement less as a finished cinema product than as a bold piece of pioneering in the jungle of pictorial journalism. Vol. I, No. 2 of the same film excels its predecessor in timing, cutting, choice of material. It comes closer to justifying itself as accomplishment rather than as. innovation, makes it apparent that topical cinema which contains no shots of ski-jumpers, cherry-blossom time in Tokyo, or an Atlantic City baby parade is a practicable entertainment formula. Best shot: the Talis- man's huge menacing bow, just before it slices into the Mohawk.

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