The New Pictures

Under Two Flags (Twentieth Century-Fox). This great-aunt of all Foreign Legion stories was written in 1867 by Louise de la Ramee (Ouida), performed on the U. S. stage by Blanche Bates, in the silent cinema by Theda Bara (1916) and Priscilla Dean (1922). The current version, costly, handsome and overlong, offers a concession to modernity: Gregory Ratoff, as a Legionnaire, says with a thick Yiddish accent: "We're all supposed to be trying to forget something, but there's so much noise around here I can't remember what it is I'm supposed to forget." More at home in Under Two Flags are Ronald Colman, who wore a kepi and baggy pants in Beau Geste ; Victor McLaglen, who has played many a bullying soldier; and Claudette Colbert, who cuddles up to the role of Cigarette, the Legion mascot who finally gallops across the desert to save the battalion from extermination by the Arabs and die dreamily in the arms of the man she loves. Colman plays the part of the Briton-with-a-past who com mits patrician misconduct with a willowy Lady Venetia (Rosalind Russell) in a ruined monastery in the desert while the sound track wallows in the Kashmiri Song.

McLaglen is the swaggering Irish officer whose jealous desire for Cigarette sets in motion the magnificently-photographed battle which is the film's best feature.

Sent out with a patrol to Certain Death, Colman stalls for time in the tent of an Arab chieftain who turns out to have been an Oxford classmate. In a sequence which should induce Hollywood to investigate England's famed Victorian society novelist further, the Arab remarks: "You remember our soccer games? Well, we shall play soccer, on horseback. And you, ho-ho, shall be the ball."

We Are From Kronstadt (Amkino). The hallmark of most Russian films is their incongruous blend of loose amateurism and disciplined genius. In We Are From Kronstadt, Cameraman N. Naumov-Straj turns in a magnificent feat of cinematography when he articulates the progress of this remarkable revolutionary battle piece. Taking advantage of the dank Baltic gloom around the Kronstadt Naval Base to begin his film in low key, he dramatically heightens it until the climax is reached with the great attack and rout of the White Army on the bleached, glaring tundras north of Petrograd. At the same time, We Are From Kronstadt is periodi cally botched by overexposures, uncommunicative acting sequences, sagging pace.

In Russian cinematography, however, even shortcomings have merit, since they somehow manage to produce a sort of spontaneous, newsreel authenticity. Never before approximated for sheer credibility is Director E. Dzigan's uncanny recreation of a minor infantry rush, which supplies the picture's climax about an hour before it is due. The men flop at the first signs of fire, try to scratch up a few handfuls of earth to hide behind, stare at each other to see who will have nerve enough to follow the commander forward, stumble to their feet, start to run and, the lust and excitement of combat suddenly on them, break into that wild monotone which, in civil life, is heard only in the frenzy of a prison riot.

Historical fabric of We Are From Kronstadt is woven from the unsuccessful opera tions of White General Yudenich around Petrograd in the embattled autumn of 1919, when the sailors from Kronstadt in time's nick reinforced workers' battalions and Red Army detachments defending the old capital. That the workers and Army men were compelled to turn around two years later and butcher the fickle and truculent Kronstadt sailors for counter revolution is obviously a sequel which this Bolshevist propaganda film chooses to leave unpictured. In We Are From Kron stadt, the sailors are determinedly glorified as immortal heroes of the working class. This reverent attitude and the genuine historical excitement of the film leave little time for cinematic frivolity. Nevertheless, familiar to U. S. followers of the cinematic hostility between cocky James Cagney and dogged Pat O'Brien is the antipathy which the sailor Balashov (G. Bushuyev) holds for the soldier Burmistrov, originating, as is always the case with Cagney v. O'Brien, over the disputed favors of a lady. Only strictly Soviet contribution to this aged Hollywood situation is the prim Communist conclusion in which it is revealed that the girl is beyond the reach of both sailor and soldier, being the heroic wife of a heroic commissar. This curious asceticism need not mar a picture which has probably not been matched for photography since The Informer, has certainly not been equaled for military realism since Chapayev.

The Golden Arrow (Warner) is a minor comedy based upon the theory that a pressagent for a cosmetic company could make headlines by: 1) establishing a cafeteria cashier as a cold cream heiress; 2) grooming her to marry a European title; 3) publicizing her $30-a-week newshawk husband as ''the American Cinderella Man." This is Bette Davis' first film since she won an Academy award for acting in Dangerous (TIME, March 16)-- a fact of which Warner Brothers made much use in their advertising. Although Miss Davis still can make her eyes pop and her lips droop, The Golden Arrow proves nothing more than that she is adept at nonchalance. Good shot: her proposal of marriage to George Brent while they hang upside down in a Ferris wheel.

The Country Beyond (Twentieth Century-Fox) is a James Oliver Curwood story containing a great deal of snow and a large St. Bernard dog named Buck, which has appeared in Call of the Wild and Little Lord Fauntleroy. More restful to the eye & ear than most cinemanimals, easy-going Buck is antisocial to the point of declining to take sides between his mistress (Rochelle Hudson) and a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman (Robert Kent) who has her in custody because she helped her father escape after being caught with stolen furs. When the girl endeavors to mush off through the snow, Buck lies down at a word from the Mountie, later earns his money by making an overland dash for help, returns in time to engage in a battle with a Great Dane.

Till We Meet Again (Paramount). To the classic formula of two spies in love has been added a new angle--a third spy, also in love. Ludwig (Lionel Atwill) is a German agent who is in love with Elsa (Gertrude Michael) who is in love with an English actor named Alan (Herbert Marshall). When war is declared on the night before Elsa was to have married Alan, Ludwig forces the girl to take a secret service assignment that will separate her, presumably forever, from her fiance. When they meet again, Elsa and Alan are not troubled by the loyalty to duty which makes life complicated for most lovers in spy stories but drop their official commitments and start for the Dutch frontier, closely pursued by Ludwig. Their escape is made possible by a sacrifice on the part of Ludwig, rendered with authority by an actor who has been making such sacrifices for 20 years.

Till We Meet Again has the suspense proper to pictures where the issues at stake are not who makes love to whom but whether those who want to make love are to live or die by doing so. Although its handling of secret service technique will suffer by comparison with more carefully authenticated spy stories, notably MGM's Rendezvous, it contains two memorable scenes: 1) a brilliant reproduction of the firing of one of the famed Ger man long-range siege guns trained on Paris, followed by its destruction by secret serv ice sabotage; 2) the examination in a bag gage car of a coffin in which the fleeing Alan is supposed to have hidden.

Gertrude Michael is a Talladega, Ala. girl who used to run a radio station in her hometown, giving household hints and calisthenics in the morning, economic lectures and piano recitals in the afternoon and in the evening singing ballads and playing the violin. She had equipped herself for this career by studies at University of Alabama and Converse College. Later she got into enough Broadway plays to inter est M-G-M in testing her and arrived in Hollywood with two suitcases, expecting to stay a fortnight. She has never been back, either to Broadway or Talladega.

In Hollywood she gained quick distinction for a quality unique in actresses under 45 -- she would play anything. She was the only good-looking girl whom Paramount found willing to stick her face through a doorway in I'm No Angel and let Mae West squirt water into it. Her performance in 'Murder at the Vanities was so nastily expert that Paramount decided she was ripe for better parts. She lives with her mother in a house at Toluca Lake in Los Angeles, works too hard to go out much, saves her money, regarded driving an automobile as fun until she was hurt in an accident in Phoenix, Ariz. Since the water-squirting episode, she has been one of Mae West's best friends.

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