New Pictures

Rhodes (Gaumont-British) is the latest in the current series of cinema biographies. Its subject is the great English nationalist, Cecil Rhodes, famed as unifier of South Africa, better known in the U. S. as founder of the Rhodes Scholarships. Though it is solely with the former that this British picture deals, the U. S. need feel no slight, for Walter Huston was taken to England to play the lead in an otherwise all-foreign cast.

Already a diamond tycoon at 20, Cecil Rhodes is given "six months to live" by a Dr. Jameson (Basil Sydney), who examines him in South Africa in 1873. Ten years later he is not only still alive but master of South African diamond mines. With the help of Dr. Jameson, now his best friend, he pushes on to fulfill his lifelong ideal--to unite South Africa, then the whole world, under the British Empire. His first step is to absorb Matabeleland, lush jungle nation ruled by King Lobengula. As Premier, he next tries to get Transvaal, ruled by the Boers, sole white rivals to English supremacy. Foiled by the stolid smugness of Boer President Oom Paul Kruger (Oscar Homolka), Rhodes allows himself to be persuaded into using force. The resulting fiasco of "Jameson's Raid" forces him to resign all his high positions, lose his virtual dictatorship. Unbowed by defeat, he admits the wrong, dies quietly just as the Boer War is bringing true the Union of South Africa he always sought.

One prime asset of Rhodes is its obvious sincerity and meticulous attention to fact. Another asset is its refusal to drag in that usual cinema qua non, a false romance. Yet these qualities, which make it good history, also make it a painfully pedestrian picture. Walter Huston has to boom out such lines as: "Napoleon tried to unite Europe and failed. I am trying to unite South Africa, and I will not fail."

King Lobengula is played by a genuine Matabele warrior named Ndanisa Kumalo. A huge, jovial black, brought to England for the production, he proved to be a superb actor. In history, Rhodes stole King Lobengula's country; in Rhodes, King Lobengula steals the show.

Klondike Annie (Paramount). Said the Hearst New York American last week: "The attention of the churches, the women's clubs, the various state censors, the state legislatures and the Congress of the United States is called to the fact that Mae West has produced another screen play which she wrote herself. . . ." Whether or not Klondike Annie is really worth the attention of Congressmen will depend on how familiar they are with earlier West efforts from which the current one differs only in detail. This time she is a San Francisco strumpet who knifes her Chinese paramour, slips on board an Alaska-bound freighter, enraptures its captain (Victor McLaglen), befriends a churchworker bound for Nome, usurps her identity when she dies, lands in Nome as Sister Annie Alden, enslaves a young territorial police officer (Philip Reed), renounces him rather than ruin his career, returns to San Francisco to face the music. As usual, the comedy depends mainly upon the incongruity between Mae West's up-to-date wisecracks and their fin de siecle background.

For Cinemactress Mae West, last week was possibly the liveliest she has experienced since she entered the cinema industry in 1932. The Hearst editorials she inspired, however useful they may have proved as publicity for Klondike Annie, were not intended to be laudatory. They were part of a sudden Hearst campaign against Miss West supposedly inspired by a slighting remark she was reported to have made about Cinemactress Marion Davies. While they ballyhooed the picture with angry editorials, Hearst papers paradoxically refused to carry paid advertising for it (see p. 61).

In Kansas City, Cinemactress West's Manager James Timony was asked to comment on her current bickering with Paramount about her contract. Said he: "Lubitsch thought in his Hitler way he could push her around. ... In the end she pushed him around. . . . After all. she was in the show business before he thought of being. . . ." On his way to Europe for a honeymoon. Director Ernst Lubitsch replied as impudently as possible: "Try to push her around? . . . She's much too heavy. ... Of course she was in show business before I was. She's older than I am." Director Lubitsch is 44.

In Manhattan Actor Frank Wallace, who last spring announced that he and Mae West were married in Milwaukee in 1911 and had never been divorced, re-opened his suit to prove it. Said Mae West: "Wait a minute, sweetheart--which Frank Wallace is it? There are three of them. ... I'm not married to him and I never was. . . ."

Give Us This Night* (Paramount) is three-quarters sheer melody. Its ballads are the most advanced light opera music yet composed for cinema, and it contains one scene of cinema's first original grand opera--a balcony scene from a work called Romeo & Juliet of which only a few skeleton scenes were ever written. All the music except a short interpolation from Il Trovatore was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose Violanta and Dead City have been given at the Metropolitan and who arranged the Mendelssohn score for Warner Brothers' Midsummer Night's Dream.

Nine years ago in Vienna a stocky young tenor with wonderful teeth arched his stout chest into the high notes of a Korngold opera, The Miracle Of Heliane. Since then Jan Kiepura has risen to fame in European screen operettas.

This time he is a singing fisherman who throws an egg at Tenor Alan Mowbray because he does not like his voice. Hiding from the carabinieri under the terrace of a big house, he hears Gladys Swarthout rehearsing a scene from Romeo & Juliet. Next day when Kiepura is in jail because of the egg. Miss Swarthout brings a composer (Philip Merivale) to hear him sing. The composer inspires so much gratitude in Kiepura by giving him a job that Kiepura later leaves the company when he finds the composer is also in love with Miss Swarthout. The complications intervening until the curtain can fall on the Kiepura & Swarthout reunion, after a superb aria in Romeo & Juliet, are concerned with bringing him back, getting rid of the drunken self-worshipping tenor.

Strictly in the new technique for screen operettas, the plot is less a series of music cues than an ornamental bubble tossed on the Hood of song issuing from Kiepura and Swarthout. Best ballads: A Song Kissed the Sky, I Need to Say I Love You.

Wife v. Secretary (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a grimly stereotyped investigation, without novel outcome, of the banal situation indicated by its title. Adapted by Norman Krasna, Alice Duer Miller and John Lee Mahin from a Faith Baldwin story, acted by Clark Gable, Myrna Loy (wife) and Jean Harlow (secretary), it is patently destined to be, for its producers, if not for their more civilized customers, one of the most profitable pictures of the year.

Desire (Paramount). There are two possible reasons why this picture was approved by the Hays organization. The first is that its agents were not sophisticated enough to understand it. The second is that U. S. cinema censors have suddenly become sufficiently enlightened to pass scenes showing a young couple misbehaving together when the picture which includes them has definite esthetic merit. Desire is a romantic comedy of grace, dexterity and charm in which Marlene Dietrich's performance is the best she has given since she became too dignified to exhibit the legs which brought her her first U. S. fame in the Bine Angel in 1930.

The picture opens in Paris, where Tom Bradley (Gary Cooper), a handsome young automobile engineer from Detroit, is setting out for a holiday in Spain. Madeleine de Beaupre (Marlene Dietrich) is also off for Spain. She is a de luxe jewel thief and in her handbag is secreted a pearl necklace worth 2,200,000 francs. Their paths cross along the road, where he fixes her car; again at the border, where she slips the pearls into his pocket to get past the customs inspectors; once more in Madrid, where she joins her oily confederate (John Halliday). When the three are sequestered together in an Andalusian mountain inn, the flirtation between Bradley and Madeleine suddenly ripens into something else, something which Director Frank Borzage contrives to convey in scenes which are at once gay, delicate and, in view of the cinema's attitude toward such matters since the Legion of Decency started to operate in 1934, sensationally explicit.

*Not to be confused with The Night Is Young, A Night at the Opera, Two for Tonight, Every Night at Eight, Let's Live Tonight, Night Life of the Gods, It Happened One Night, After Tonight, Be Mine Tonight, Out All Night, Night After Night.

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