The New Pictures

The Spanish Earth (Contemporary Historians, Inc.). Last winter Writers John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish and Ernest Hemingway (see p. 66) decided that one way they might intelligently serve the Spanish Leftists was by producing a film showing the Leftists' version of the origin and progress of the revolution. Finding that little of the source material available in the U. S. could adequately supply them with the dramatic and pictorial qualities they had in mind, Messrs. Dos Passos and MacLeish formed Contemporary Historians, Inc., decided to send their own experts to Spain. There Dutch Director Joris Ivens and Author Hemingway, who followed him, spent several months on various fronts, two weeks in the village of Fuentiduena, 60 kilometers from Madrid. This week the film they made, previously seen by a number of sympathetic groups in its formative stages (TIME, June 21), will be generally released for the first time in Manhattan. Long awaited, it was conceded by preview audiences to be well worth waiting for.

It would have been surprising if The Spanish Earth had not turned out as well as it did. Everyone connected with it, largely liberal artists eager to contribute their talents to the cause of Spanish democracy, has a record of high achievement. Besides Author Hemingway, who wrote and recites the infrequent but unforgettably eloquent narrative lines, there were five other unusually meritorious contributors. Director Ivens and his photographer, John Ferno, won the National Board of Review's second award for a foreign film* last year with their filming of the damming of the Zuyder Zee. The sonorous Hispanic melodies that play in and out of The Spanish Earth were arranged by two of the most imaginative modern musicians in the U. S.--Virgil Thomson (Four Saints in Three Acts, The Plow That Broke the Plains) and Marc Blitzstein (The. Cradle Witt Rock).

Between them, these collaborators tell the story of the Spanish revolution in terms of people rather than in terms of action. Not since the silent French film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, has such dramatic use been made of the human face. As face after face looks out from the screen the picture becomes a sort of portfolio of portraits of the human soul in the presence of disaster and distress. There are the earnest faces of speakers at meetings and in the village talking war, exhorting the defense. There are faces of old women moved from their homes in Madrid for safety's sake, staring at a bleak, uncertain future, faces in terror after a bombing (see cut), faces of men going into battle and the faces of men who will never return from battle, faces full of grief and determination and fear.

The pictures were not posed, not acted. Ivens and Ferno suffered the bombardments with the people they show. They were under fire with the soldiers, frequently resorting to a hand camera so that they could get closer to the action. Opening shots are in Fuentiduena and the bare fields surrounding the village. The townsfolk go out to dig irrigation ditches, denied them by the old regime, so they can raise food for the defenders of Madrid. The camera moves from the village to Madrid, to the front, to an attack on a bridge, back to the town. University City, rising raggedly above the cellars where insurgents are huddled, is bombarded before the camera. Men attack in groups of six at the battle for the bridge, and an airplane of German make spins down in flames. But the action shots remain as background to the life of a people suffering from war. The story keeps returning to the village where the ditches are being dug, and ends with the waters of the Tagus River flowing into the fields, timidly, as though the normal productive ways of man were almost, but not quite, beyond hope.

Souls at Sea (Paramount). On the foggy night in 1841 when the packet William Brown, Liverpool for Boston, disastrously rammed an iceberg off Newfoundland, a seaman named Alexander William Holmes made maritime history. Seaman Holmes, seeing that 32 survivors were too many for his longboat, constituted himself, a sailor and a Negro cook as a jury to decide who should be pitched overboard. Holmes and friends had jettisoned seven men and women before they were picked up by a passing vessel. Brought to Philadelphia for trial, Holmes was convicted of manslaughter with a recommendation for mercy, served six months in prison before going back to the sea. Seaman Holmes's story, radically transformed by the crack team of Scenarist Grover Jones & Director Henry Hathaway (Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine) and magnificently photographed by Academy Award Winner Charles Lang (A Farewell to Arms), makes a notable adventure picture.*

In Souls at Sea Holmes gets a new name, "Nuggin" Taylor, and a considerably more respectable character. Taylor (Gary Cooper) singlehanded is out to break up the slave trade. When a shipload of savages on the slaver Blackbird drags the captain down into the hold and kills him, Nuggin and his raffish shipmate Powdah (George Raft) assume command of the ship, begin to put Nuggin's ideal into action by turning the slaves loose on the coast of Africa. Surprised by a British patrol boat, the two are taken to Liverpool after being strung up by their thumbs until they convince the authorities that their sympathies are on the right side. The intelligence service thereupon decides to use Nuggin to break up the slave ring by sending him across the ocean to Savannah with faked instructions for the ring's American operatives. The boat Nuggin and Powdah take is the William Brown, which rams no iceberg but becomes a smothering holocaust when a lamp in the steerage is overturned. Powdah and his sweetheart Babsie (Olympe Bradna) drown. Nuggin and his sweetheart Margaret Tarryton (Frances Dee) would have drowned, too, had not Nuggin coolly dispatched her brother, secretly in league with the slavers, and a number of others who threaten to swamp nis lifeboat. Like Seaman Holmes. Nuggin is also brought to trial and convicted. Unlike Holmes, Nuggin is promised another day in court as the film ends.

Against the elemental forthrightness of background that the sea can sometimes provide, gaunt Gary Cooper creates a character no less remarkable than his impersonation of "Wild Bill" Hickock in The Plainsman, proving once more that few others in Hollywood perform so credibly outdoors. Outstanding in an excellent supporting cast is Olympe Bradna, a comely 16-year-old whom Paramount has lately been building up to challenge Twentieth Century-Fox's Simone Simon. Actress Bradna, picturesquely born to two bareback riders between performances at the Olympe Theatre in Paris, entered her theatrical career in her parents' act at the age of 18 months, did a specialty acrobatic dance at the age of eight in the French version of Hit the Deck. Good shots: the William Brown burning majestically down to the water; Nuggin curing Margaret of nausea at the rail.

The Firefly (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

When Napoleon has put his relatives on most of the thrones of Central Europe and is wondering how to get Spain for his brother Joseph, a dancer named Nina Maria (Jeanette MacDonald) is deputized as a spy by the Spanish Secret Police and told off to help thwart the Napoleonic plan. On a mission to France she is pursued by one Don Diego (Allan Jones) who cooks her an omelet between tuneful declarations of love. She reciprocates his feelings but her mission fails when Don Diego turns out to be a counterspy. Her revenge comes later when she tricks the French and Don Diego into sending a carrier-pigeon message that spells the end of French domination on the peninsula.

This expensive picture was adapted from the pre-War stage success of the same name but contains practically nothing of the original except Rudolph Frimi's tunes and Otto Harbach's song titles. Excellently directed by Robert Z. Leonard, the present version will be supremely satisfying to devotees of Frimi, of Allan Jones, and of Miss MacDonald's beautifully denticulated soprano.

*Winner of the first award: Alexander Korda's Rembrandt, with Charles Laughton.

*Last week Paramount was attempting to enjoin 400 independent exhibitors in Pennsylvania New Jersey and Delaware from boycotting its films because six intensively promoted pictures, including Souls at Sea and High, Wide, and Handsome, had been withheld from smaller theatres for special distribution.

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