The New Pictures

The Golem (AB Films). Ghetto legend in Prague says that in the early 17th Century, a mysterious Rabbi Loew, crony of Emperor Rudolph II, constructed a semi-human statue-monster called the Golem (the "Strong") which, if Prague's Jews ever needed aid, would come to life and provide it. In 1920 this legend provided the material for one of the most horrifying pictures ever made. Produced by UFA (see p. 52), directed by Paul Wegener. who also wrote the scenario and played the title role, it showed the Golem on an expressionistic rampage (see cut). Last year. Production Manager Frank Kassler of A-B (for nothing) Films, which makes most of Czechoslovakia's annual program of about 30 feature pictures at $30,000 each, decided to make another Golem. He hired Director Julien Duvivier (La Maternelle), Actor Harry Baur (Les Miserables), spent $200,000 building a medieval ghetto in his Prague studio, set to work with a French script.

Main character in Producer Kassler's Golem is not the Golem but Emperor Rudolph (Harry Baur). Half-mad, bullied by his Prime Minister and harried by his mistress (Germaine Aussey), he has a fixation about the Golem, wants it destroyed. Prague's persecuted Jews are equally determined to preserve it. Rabbi Loew is dead but his successor, Rabbi Jacob, knows the formula for bringing the Golem to life, tells it to his wife. The Golem is not disturbed until most of Prague's Jews have been tossed into the lion pit in the Emperor's dungeons. Jacob's wife then whispers the magic words, scratches some Hebrew letters on the Golem's forehead and tells him to get started. The rampage in this case does not last long. After bending some iron bars, brushing a few walls and cracking a pillar or two, the Golem (Ferdinand Hart) throws Rudolph out a window. Rabbi Jacob then makes a few more magic motions, and the Golem disappears.

Equipped with a serious, timely theme, a full-blown performance by Actor Baur, for whom madmen and the like are a specialty, The Golem does not aim to be a horror picture. Nonetheless, ably directed, festooned with English subtitles, its principal message for cinemaddicts who remember its predecessor will be that old Golems are the best Golems. Good shot: Ru dolph trying to engage the Golem in talk, raging when the statue fails to answer.

May time (Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer). Loudest, most lavish and most lushly sentimental operetta of the season, this pic ture opens with a sequence in which a tottering old lady settles down on a garden bench to tell a young girl the story of her life. The life story starts at the court of Napoleon III where the old lady is lovely young Marcia Mornay (Jeanette MacDonald), enjoying the first fruits of success as an opera singer. After rendering two songs at a court soiree, Marcia goes home with her manager, Nazaroff, agrees to marry him as a reward for making her rich & famous. As cinemaddicts are well aware, grati tude is a bad excuse for matrimony. No sooner is Marcia engaged to Nazaroff than she meets a romantic young baritone, Paul Allison (Nelson Eddy), who lives in a garret with his teacher (Herman Bing). Marcia and Paul have one happy afternoon singing duets at a Mayday festival.

Then they part, not to meet again until ten years later on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. When Nazaroff perceives, from the enthusiasm with which they perform, on the stage, that Paul and Marcia are in love, he removes his pistol from its velvet case, goes to pay a call on Paul. A crime of passion is the consequence. At this point, the scene shifts to the garden bench. The old lady advises her young friend to marry her fiance instead of going to New York to study singing. The young girl seems dis posed to do so.

May time contains a carload of music by Sigmund Romberg, Leo Delibes, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Herbert Stothart and Peter Tschaikovsky. Its singing is the best that Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy have ever committed to a sound track. Its story, adapted from Rida Johnson Young's 20-year-old play by MGM's newest literary lion, 26-year-old Noel Langley, utilizes every known device for assaulting the emotions. Its running time is 2 hr., 12 min. For cinemaddicts who think that ordinary screen operetta is entertaining, Maytime may well constitute the best entertainment of 1937. For cinemaddicts who think otherwise, it will constitute a monumental bore. Songs: Will You Remember (Sweetheart}; Carry Me Back to Old Virginny; Les Filles de Cadiz; excerpts from Tschaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, adapted for vocalizing by Musical Director Stothart. Personal Property (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). As a comedy smash of 1931 this story, then called The Man in Possession, was regarded as the ultimate development in scatter-brained lightheartedness. The dramatic currents of six years flowing under such bridges as My Man Godfrey, Libeled Lady, Love Is News and Theodora Goes Wild have taken the bite out of its impertinences, diluted its daring almost to primness. What is left is, however, pleas ant enough, with Robert Taylor and Jean Harlow lending their famed respective brands of sex appeal, at times incongruously but never without tonic effect, to the mild situations.

Raymond Dabney (Robert Taylor), a young man just out of jail for selling an unpaid-for automobile, meets Mrs. Crystal Wetherby (Jean Harlow) in a London hotel lounge, follows her to the opera and then to her house, which he finds picketed by a bailiff (Forrester Harvey). By the time Crystal has summoned a policeman to deal with her annoyer, Raymond has secured appointment as a sheriff's officer.

Taking possession of the premises he settles down for the night in Mrs. Wetherby's guest bedroom. She tries to frighten him by lending him a pair of gargantuan pajamas which, she says, her husband has discarded as too small. In the picture's funniest sequence she puts on a pair of hiking boots, clumps up the stairs in simulation of a drunken male's arrival while Raymond, swathed in yards of striped pongee, listens trembling in his bedroom. Next day, after he has volunteered to act as butler at a dinner she is giving to celebrate her engagement, Raymond is horrified to find her fiance is his own brother, Claude (Reginald Owen). Dumping salad dressing over Claude's dinner clothes is a less effective weapon for engagement-breaking than the information Raymond can supply about the debts of Mrs. Wetherby. The man in possession buys the debts, breaks up the wedding party, takes possession of the furniture and, finally, of Crystal. Taylor's Raymond is more amatory, less acrid than that of Robert Montgomery in the earlier screen version; Harlow's Crystal is a lady so enameled she seems on the point of chipping.

History Is Made At Night (United Artists) is not historical, only faintly nocturnal. It is a gusty romantic divertissement hand-tailored by Screenwriters Gene Towne and Graham Baker to fit the talents of its three principal players, Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur and Leo Carrillo. Its purpose is entertainment and it achieves its end. Its importance, cinematically, is due largely to a shipwreck sequence which takes rank with the famed earthquake in San Francisco.

The favorite pastime of Steamship Magnate Bruce Vail (Colin Clive) is tormenting his wife (Jean Arthur). When she threatens to put an end to his diversion by divorce, he sends his chauffeur (Ivan Lebedeff) to her rooms, plans to trap her in the servant's arms, nullifying the divorce under the English statute that the complainant in such a suit must remain blameless during the six months between the provisional and final decrees. In the next room Paul Dumond (Charles Boyer) hears the fracas, ends it by knocking out the chauffeur. When the obsessed husband and his witness enter, Dumond avoids compromising Irene Vail by posing as a holdup man, seizing Irene's jewels, kidnapping her so that he can return them. After a happy night with him, Irene walks into her room to find the police investigating the murder of the chauffeur, killed by Vail in order to create a bloodhunt for Dumond, whom he suspects as his wife's real lover. To shield Dumond, Irene sails for the U. S. with Vail. Dumond follows her.

This complicated but well-related episode is the beginning of a kind of melodrama which the cinema can tell superbly, and which it recently has been neglecting. No effort is made to tone down characters and incidents to the neat artistic patterns of the current vogue.

The big catastrophe sequence comes when Irene and Dumond, hearing an innocent man has been arrested for Dumond's supposed crime, start back to Paris on a Vail liner making its maiden voyage. To imperil them. Tycoon Vail phones his captain to strive for a record crossing, in spite of pea-soup fog and icebergs. The disaster, supervised for seafaring technique by Sea Captain Frederick Fleugal and for special effects by James Basevi (San Francisco), is a reproduction of the sinking of the Titanic. The best shot in the picture--the horrible apparition of the fatal berg through the fog--is done with glass on a split screen. The collision itself is a miniature. The hysteria at the lifeboats, the singing of Nearer, My God, To Thee were made on a life-scale ship set.

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