The New Pictures

The Crusades (Paramount). Cinemaddicts who have had 20 years in which to grow accustomed to the methods of Cecil Blount DeMille by now have some idea what to expect in a DeMille version of the Holy Wars. The Crusades should fulfill all expectations. As a picture it is historically worthless, didactically treacherous, artistically absurd. None of these defects impairs its entertainment value. It is a $1,000,000 sideshow which has at least three features which distinguish it from the long line of previous DeMille extravaganzas. It is the noisiest; it is the biggest; it contains no baths.

According to the DeMille theory, the Third Crusade started when a Holy Man (C. Aubrey Smith), presumably Peter the Hermit who lived 100 years earlier, toured the courts of Europe and persuaded a dozen kings to besiege Jerusalem. Richard Coeur de Lion (Henry Wilcoxon) was the last to enlist and did so for no better reason than to escape a marriage with King Philip of France's sister Alice (Katherine DeMille). This turns out to be most advantageous. Before embarking at Marseille, Richard gets a boatload of cattle and feed for his army by marrying the daughter of the King of Navarre. She is a thoroughly worthwhile blonde named Berengaria (Loretta Young), and Richard sails off to the Wars in much better style than he had any reason to expect.

Oldtime religious uproar, as an excuse for battles, trick photography and downstairs orgies; is the basic DeMille formula. In Palestine, The Crusades gets its second wind and builds up to two of the liveliest climaxes in its director's career. The first arrives when Saladin (Ian Keith), the Saracen leader, kidnaps Berengaria. Richard hurries a siege tower, ladders and catapults to the walls of Acre, from which Saladin's soldiers shower arrows, spears and boiling oil. The second comes when, finding that Saladin is not in Acre but Jerusalem, the cavalry of the two armies meet in a head-on collision on the edge of a ditch into which a quorum of men and horses roll with neighs and yelps. With these two scrambles out of the way, there is not much left to happen. Saladin, who turns out to be a broad-minded Oriental, proposes a truce which Richard accepts.

When people say "like something in the movies" they usually mean like something in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. The most extraordinary fact about Director DeMille, however, is that, while the cinema has been progressing steadily toward sanity, he has made himself a greater figure in the industry as a freak in 1935 than he was in 1915 when he was in tune with his era.

Ten thousand people drew paychecks of some sort for working on his latest picture; 300,000 feet of film were shot; one set--a street, pier and boat in Marseille --covered four acres on the Paramount lot and ran for 100 ft. in the film; for three months 220 horses for knights were boarded on the lot. The picture contains 500 shields, 1,000 swords, 1,750 yd. of chain mail made out of silver-lacquered wool, 50 gallons of red collodion for blood, 2,500 lb. of crepe hair for beards. The catapult at Acre really shoots fireballs. The siege tower, five stories, 35 tons, is the biggest prop ever used in cinema. At the siege of Acre, 17 people were injured. One was Director DeMille who stuck his head out from behind his screen and got, from an extra who was not detected, a blunt arrow on the chin.

We're in the Money (Warner). The extraordinary thing about a picture like this is that, although it has been done innumerable times before, it can still seem engaging and funny. Ginger (Joan Blondell) and Dixie (Glenda Farrell) are light-hearted process servers who work for a scatter-brained lawyer (Hugh Herbert). The climax comes when Ginger, serving a summons on rich young Richard Courtney (Ross Alexander), recognizes him as the young man who, wearing a chauffeur's uniform, has been making love to her in the park. After that the story tapers off weakly but the accomplished light-comedy playing of the featured actors and a series of skilfully retouched gags keep this from becoming too noticeable. Good shot: Joan Blondell serving a summons on Man Mountain Dean, during a wrestling match.

Annapolis Farewell (Paramount). Within the first ten minutes of this film the earnest young plebe (Richard Cromwell) and his particularly objectionable roommate (Tom Brown) are discovered to be rival quarterbacks. Yet not once, for a wonder, do any of the characters appear on a football field. Instead Director Alexander Hall, with the assistance of the entire regiment of midshipmen and half a dozen Naval Academy instructors, has turned out a highly sentimental little piece, as routine as evening parade, showing how the dramatic death of a doddering old commodore finally brings the Spirit of the Navy to the particularly objectionable plebe. What distinction Annapolis Farewell has is due in large measure to Sir Guy Standing's excellent performance as Commodore Fitzhugh, a fuller, finer characterization than the tongue-tied British colonel he played in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

Commodore Fitzhugh, retired for age, moves to Annapolis to be near the service that was his whole life. There he wanders about the parade ground, getting in the way of marching columns, popping into the Superintendent's office with innumerable suggestions on how to run the Academy, building a little model of the snub-snouted U. S. S. Congress, the gunboat that he commanded at Manila Bay.

Good shot: Commodore Fitzhugh re-enacting that sea battle at the Academy soda fountain with the aid of empty bottles, glasses, bent straws, a gold watch and several badly bored midshipmen. Better shot: The Commodore and his Negro maid Miranda (Louise Beavers) gazing ecstatically at the Congress herself anchored in Annapolis roadstead and not realizing that the old ship is about to be sunk as a battle practice target.

Steamboat Round the Bend (Fox). When Marie Dressler died last year, Will Rogers promptly remarked: "Isn't the talking screen a wonderful thing for those who love a person? It allows them to live on after they have gone." If, as newspapers politely suggested last week, it occurred to Fox executives that Will Rogers' death last fortnight made it hard to know what to do with his two unreleased, completed pictures, this statement served as a convenient hint. Forty-eight hours after the Rogers funeral in Hollywood the first of the two, Steamboat Round the Bend, made its appearance in Hollywood and Chicago, began breaking Rogers records. The second, In Old Kentucky, is expected to appear in December.

A costumed melodrama of Mississippi riverboat life with Rogers as a steamboat captain, Steamboat Round the Bend in patter and pattern supplies historians with little new light on the Rogers saga. However, in addition to assuring cinemaddicts that they may still enjoy the dead actor as much as they ever did while he was alive, the picture presents a Hollywood name which may one day take its own place in cinema's sun. That, at 59, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb becomes a minor cinema star is not entirely due to the fact that the Cobb countenance closely resembles a bull frog's or that he can comically contort his vast physiognomy. Author Cobb possesses, in addition, the same cinematic quality which assisted his great & good friend Will Rogers to stardom: the inability to be anything but himself.

As the rival steamboat captain against whom Rogers has a frantic last-reel race with their boats the stake, Cobb is completely relaxed, spending all his time on the bridge leaning on the rail, squatting, lying down, bibbing mint juleps, funneling smoke from long black cigars. When, finally, he believes the race won, he decides to take a nap. Stretching out on the bridge's settee, he closes his eyes, murmurs to the mate: "When I fall asleep, take this cigar out of my mouth. I've burned up four boats already."

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