The New Pictures

Les Miserables (Twentieth Century). When he arrived in Manhattan to gloat over public response to his two latest works (see p. 53), Producer Darryl Zanuck last week told the Press: "The most notable trend in picture-making has been that resulting from the public's cry for cleaner pictures. Efforts of the producers to meet this demand have made possible . . . Copperfield, Miserables, Bengal Lancer, Richelieu. ..." Fortunately for himself and Les Miserables, Producer Zanuck was entirely wrong. Les Miserables starts in the slums, proceeds to a Toulon prison galley and reaches its climax in a Paris sewer. It is the result not of the Legion of Decency but of Victor Hugo's feelings about man's inhumanity to man and it is still, as it always has been, the grimiest great story ever told.

To cinemaddicts whose acquaintance with Les Miserables derives from the silent adaptations made in 1918 and 1927, it may come as a surprise to learn that it is not only a monstrous piece of detective fiction but also the tragedy of a man's struggle with his own fate. It starts when Jean Valjean (Fredric March), represented as a deserving member of the Paris unemployed, is sentenced to the galleys for ten years for stealing a loaf of bread. There he first encounters Javert (Charles Laughton), the police inspector whose morbid fixation on the letter of the law makes him, as long as he lives, Valjean's Nemesis. When they meet again years later, Valjean is the beneficent mayor of a prosperous provincial town. But that makes no difference to Javert who ferrets out the secret of the mayor's past and forces him to escape to Paris where their last encounter comes several years later. This time, Valjean, regenerated a second time, is setting out to rescue the sweetheart of his adopted daughter from a not. Javert, an old man now, recognizes him just in time. His face beams with monstrous exhilaration. He utters one delicious word: "Valjean!"

At this point in Les Miserables Victor Hugo wrote a five-chapter treatise on the horrors of his next background, the Paris sewers. In his presentation of Valjean's final flight, Director Richard Boleslawski contrives to convey a comparable sense of horror.

Producer Zanuck's mistake about his motive for producing Les Miserables can be excused since neither he nor his associates made any more. Richard Boleslawski, under no illusions as to the material with which he was working, surrounds the action of the picture with rich and sulphurous gloom. Fredric March, decorated with such elaborate rags and whiskers that he had to be followed about the lot by a portable dressing room, gives a splendid performance. The strange buttery face of Charles Laughton, a mask of comedy in Ruggles of Red Gap, hardens into unforgettable lines of fixed, neurotic malice in Les Miserables. More than any other single ingredient, it helps to make the picture, like David Copperfield, a superb example of what the current cinema can accomplish with a 19th Century classic.

The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal). When Carl Laemmle Jr. resurrected the cadaver of an old story by Mary Shelley and sent it shuffling out with necrotic vivacity to become the box-office smash of 1932, he cannily left the door open for a sequel. Audiences went away from Frankenstein wondering whether the monster really died in the blazing mill that seemed to be his catafalque. Now, it appears, he did not.

With a vitality that makes their efforts fully the equal of the original picture Writers William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston lift their monster (Boris Karloff) out of the water-filled cellar of the mill and send him out to terrify the countryside, break out of a dungeon, and make friends with a blind hermit who teaches him to smoke cigars and speak. Meanwhile one Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), as convincingly lunatic a scientist as ever reached the screen, shows Baron Henry Frankenstein, the monster's creator, the Tom-Thumb King, Queen, Archbishop and Satan he has cultured from human seed until they can chatter and gesticulate in test-tube prisons in his Mephistophelian laboratory. Pretorius forces the Baron to collaborate on a woman-monster by having the Baron's bride (Valerie Hobson) kidnapped until he consents. There is one scene in which Pretorius and Frankenstein make a heart for their she-demon out of the still warm organ of a young girl murdered by their assistant, and another in which they impregnate her with crackling life from a lightning bolt brought down on gigantic kite-cables. The synthetic woman (Elsa Lanchester) lives to demonstrate complete distaste for the monster intended as her mate before she is blown jnto eternity with Dr. Pretorius.

The story, told as a cutback from the recital of Mary Shelley herself, who tells it to her husband (Douglas Walton) and Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon), has none of the hangdog air that one expects in sequels. Screenwriters Hurlbut & Balderston and Director James Whale have given it the macabre intensity proper to all good horror pieces, but have substituted a queer kind of mechanistic pathos for the sheer evil that was Frankenstein. Henry VIII had enough wives to make four screen stars. Elsa Lanchester is the latest to gain stellar fame in Hollywood, having had the way paved for her by Binnie Barnes (There's Always Tomorrow), Merle Oberon (Folies Bergere) and Wendy Barrie (It's a Small World). In private life also Miss Lanchester is the wife of Henry VIII (Charles Laughton). Although he is known for his plump effeminacy, she is mannish in dress. She journeyed from England to play Clickett Micawber's slavey in David Copperfield, a portrait mostly left on the cutting-room floor; appeared briefly in Naughty Marietta. As a child she refused to be educated at a young ladies' seminary, was the only girl at a small English school for boys. She ran her own night club for a while, did a turn in Chariot's Revue, is a candid camera addict and while in Hollywood wanders around streets and byways taking pictures of interesting dogs, horses and persons.

Reckless (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow) is a torch-singer. "I waste no weeping on lost romances," she growls, "I pay my losses and take new chances." The first chance she takes is a marriage to a young moneybags (Franchot Tone) whose remorse, the day after this casual ceremony, is such as to make him eye his morning pick-up as if it were poison. The marriage ends when, in a fit of alcoholic miseries on the night of a large party, he shoots himself as ungallantly as possible, leaving Miss Leslie about to bear a baby whose paternity becomes the subject of a front-page law suit.

This enables Ned Riley (William Powell), a jolly sports promoter who once put Mona Leslie to sleep by proposing to her and has befriended her during her spectacular home life, to slip a ring on her finger when she is a widow making her stage comeback with a song called "Hear What My Heart Is Saying."

What purpose all this may serve, beyond reminding cinemaddicts of the Reynolds-Holman case three years ago, it is hard to say. As entertainment, its principal virtue is the way in which it disguises the fact that, since she can neither sing nor dance, Jean Harlow is less than the ideal heroine for a musical comedy, by effective concentration on her more fundamental talents, gowned by Adrian.

Cardinal Richelieu (Twentieth Century) can be identified, in the gallery of George Arliss' portraits of historical celebrities, as the one in which he practices a downright deception. In order to foil plotters who requested his ward's husband to murder him, Richelieu quickly persuades this open-minded young man to change sides and to tell the Duc de Baradas that he has done his ugly chore instead of really doing it. A moment of some tension arrives when Baradas inspects Arliss lying on a sofa with his eyes shut, wonders whether to stick a sword into him. When, for no valid reason, Baradas decides not to, the tension is over and Cardinal Richelieu spryly sets off about his business of bamboozling Queen Mother Marie into handing over an incriminating treaty, identifying for fat Louis XIII the plotters against his throne and personally defeating an amalgamation of enemies which seems to comprise at least half the character actors in Hollywood.

Released with as much fanfare as Les Miserables (see p. 52), Cardinal Richelieu is still almost as exciting as when Bulwer-Lytton first gave it to the world a hundred years ago. That Richelieu allows himself to become party to a lie does not mean that in other particulars George Arliss' performance differs materially from the ones he has given already as Rothschild, Alexander Hamilton, Disraeli and the Duke of Wellington. Francis Lister's ugly portrait of the king's younger brother Gaston is probably the best acting in the picture. Exciting shot: Arliss stopping his horse without saying "whoa."

The Youth of Maxim (Lenfilm) relates the adventures which transform a jolly young factory worker into a hard-working member of the party which preserved the spark of the Russian Revolution after the unsuccessful revolt of 1905. When first seen, Maxim (Boris Chirkov) is stumping off to work cheerfully enough with his two companions, Andrei and Dyoma. Andrei is killed in a factory accident caused by an overseer's neglect. In the riots that follow, Dyoma kills a policeman. He and Maxim are carted off to jail where Dyoma is shot. By the time Maxim is freed, he is ready to help Revolutionist Polivanov (M. Tarkhanov) and his girl lieutenant Natasha solidify their chapter of the underground revolutionary society. When Polivanov is wounded by police, Maxim has become responsible enough to take his place. At the end of the picture he is saying good-by to Natasha, setting off as a minor leader in the party to carry on its efforts in another city.

At Moscow's Cinema Festival held last month to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Soviet cinema, The Youth of Maxim shared first prize with Chapayev (TIME, Jan. 28) and Peasants, to be released in the U. S. next month. Like Chapayev, this attentive and historically intriguing study of the Revolution in its infancy is infused with qualities which U. S. cine-maddicts may find new in Russian cinema: an ability to take its message for granted, to establish a sensible relation between the political preoccupations and the other concerns of its characters, to laugh at itself. Technically as adept as Chapayev, with an equally good performance by Boris Chirkov (last month made an "Honorary Artist of the Republic"), The Youth of Maxim also contains a musical score and sound arrangements contributed by U. S. S. R.'s brilliant young composer. Dmitri Shostakovich (Lady Macbeth of Mzensk). It begins a trilogy which will carry the biography of Maxim up to the present time. Best sound: "Varshayianka," sung by workers in jail to infuriate their guards.

Go Into Your Dance (Warner) is a good-humored backstage musicomedy of which the two most noticeable ingredients are Ruby Keeler's legs and Al Jolson's mother complex. Since neither constitutes a novelty to U. S. cinema audiences, Go Into Your Dance is not likely to add to Warner Brothers' stature as the boldest experimenters in Hollywood. But. since both are legitimate embellishments for a story about an overconfident song-&-dance man regenerated by the good influence of a partner who keeps him sober and rescues him from the clutch of a gangster's wife (Helen Morgan), Go Into Your Dance is satisfactory entertainment of its school. Likeliest song hit: "About a Quarter to Nine."

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