The New Pictures

Dark Rapture (Denis-Roosevelt). If there is anything more painfully familiar to followers of travel cinema than the spectacle of a group of African natives dressed in last week's laundry and chewing old twigs, it is the spectacle of the same African natives abusing a tame lion, which the sound track describes as a man-eating monster. The cinema has, in fact, covered the subject of Africa so frequently and so badly that cinemaddicts might be excused for believing that the whole terrain must be at once less worthy of attention and more thoroughly photographed than any other place on earth, outside of Hollywood. One certain effect of Dark Rapture will be to shatter this conviction.

It is a travelogue of such superb beauty and excitement that it makes the opposite qualities in most African travelogues seem the result of sheer malevolence on the part of their makers.

Reduced to its essentials, Dark Rapture is merely the record of a trip into the Belgian Congo by Armand Denis, Mrs.

Leila Roosevelt Denis, their native porters and a battery of ubiquitous cameras. In the course of their journey the Denis party discovered a race of giants, the Watusi, who look like Egyptian sculptures and dance like jitterbugs, and surprised a Pygmy tribe in the act of building a skyscraper bridge out of rope vines. They also went on an elephant hunt without failing to photograph the finish, and escaped from a forest fire which was obviously genuine. These and similar exploits would by themselves be enough to make Dark Rapture, except for its title, a model for pictures of its type. In addition, Explorer Denis pickled his adventures in some of the most beautiful landscape photography ever recorded on film, used native music as the basis for a brilliant accompanying score and furnished an announcer, John Martin, who gives a running account of the proceedings without sounding like a hysteric with crumbs in his throat. The net result is an entertainment which not only makes the Dark Continent cease to seem dull but makes many Holly-wood A pictures soporific by comparison. Best bit part: Pygmy kibitzer sneering at the bridge building.

The Sisters (Warner Bros.) substitutes for Dreiserian strength, tenacity and patience;--chief merits of the Myron Brinig novel from which it was adapted--the cinematically more essential merits of pace, tidiness and scenic value. Opening at an election-night ball in the mining town of Silver Bow, Mont, in the year 1904, the picture traces the lives of half-a-dozen of the guests, ending, for no particular reason, when they meet again to get the early returns in 1908. Ostensibly its three heroines are Louise, Helen, and Grace Elliott, daughters of Silver Bow's druggist, but before much footage has slid through the projection machines, it becomes apparent that Helen (Anita Louise) and Grace (Jane Bryan) function chiefly to preserve a semblance of the sorority pattern that served Warners so well in Four Daughters.

Concentrating on Louise (Bette Davis) and Frank Medlin (Errol Flynn), the reporter she marries before she has known him a week, The Sisters shows their San Francisco menage exposed to the successive shocks of his dipsomania, jealousy and disappearance on a tramp steamer.

Thus, when the earthquake--which cine-maddicts with sensitive eardrums have been anticipating nervously ever since the establishment of the story's time and place --finally begins to rattle, it is almost an anticlimax. Unlike the same phenomenon in San Francisco, it inflicts no more than a few severe bruises on the cast, leaving most of them intact for their grand reunion later. Success or failure of such a picture as The Sisters depends largely on how well it evokes the mood of an era which lies within memory's horizon for many people who will see it. In this respect, Milton Krims's screen play, Anatole Litvak's direction and the acting of Flynn and Miss Davis are eminently successful. A trifle pretentious in its narrative manner, The Sisters has the salient virtue of making it clear that in 1908 that sleepy year seemed just as fateful as 1938 does now, and for somewhat similar reasons. Good shot: The Medlins' San Francisco neighbor squealing the earthquake war cry: "It's the end of the world."

Stablemates (Metro-GoIdwyn-Mayer) gives Wallace Beery a chance to duplicate, with a few trivial alterations, his famed role in The Champ (1931). In The Champ, Beery was a broken-down plug-ugly who achieved moral and physical regeneration through his desire to justify the adoration of little Jackie Cooper. In Stablemates, he is a dilapidated veterinary surgeon, restored to some degree of selfrespect by the grateful affection of Mickey Rooney and a race horse named Lady Q.

From the time when Beery, fortified by gulps of gin from a water pail, cuts a tumor out of Lady Q's right forefoot, there is not much doubt about how Stablemates will end. However, before the climactic race, enough has happened to the chief personages involved to make any reasonably susceptible cinemaddict as worried as though he had a good-sized bet on the outcome. Good shot: Beery and Rooney pulling a harrow to pay for a night's lodging while Lady Q romps playfully in the next field.

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