The New Pictures

Juarez (Warner Bros.). When Juarez (pronounced "Hwa'-race") had its world premiere in Manhattan's Hollywood Theatre last week, C. I. O.'s John Llewellyn Lewis showed up in a starched shirt. Before the picture started, everyone stood for The Star-Spangled Banner.* Both tributes were fitting, for Juarez is the most political and patriotic canto in the whole Warner cycle of epic biography. Produced at a cost of $2,000,000, over a period of two years, with the services of six Academy Award winners and a cast of 1,188, it is not only the most ambitious production in Warner history but by all odds the most spectacular picture of the year.

The hero of Juarez, who does not appear in it, is James Monroe, fifth President of the U. S. and promulgator of the doctrine that the U. S. wants no foreigners in its back yard. Juarez begins when that doctrine is challenged by cocky little Napoleon III (Claude Rains), who thinks he can set up a Mexican Empire while the U. S. has its hands full with the Civil War. Napoleon's instrument is a foppish but well-intentioned Habsburg archduke, Maximilian (Brian Aherne). Through an engineered plebiscite, Maximilian and his wife Carlota (Bette Davis) are duped into accepting the rule of a remote and turbulent land.

To underline its central character, Juarez makes blond-bearded Maximilian a finer straw man than history allows. Benito Pablo Juarez, the Indian-blooded Constitutional President of Mexico, is a democrat because "when a monarch misrules, he changes the people; when a president misrules, the people change him." In this simple faith Juarez, played with stolid nobility by Paul Muni in a dusty Prince Albert and stovepipe hat, is unmoved by Maximilian's liberal protestations, his break with his selfish landowner backers, his sincere offer to make the President his Secretary of State. And when the U. S. finally frightens Napoleon into abandoning the puppet emperor to his fate, Juarez makes a choice between principle and pity, sends Maximilian before a firing squad.

Essentially two stories (in the picture, as in fact, Juarez and Maximilian never meet), Juarez is unified by its democratic theme, of which it is a picturesque and moving statement. Not a rich pageant of Central American guerrillas and gaiety like Viva Villa!, nor as searching a personal portrait as The Life of Emile Zola, it has moments as gay and as revealing as either. Actor Muni has never been so impressive as he is in outfacing an armed camp of rebels; Actress Davis' mad scene is real cinematic excitement. And for Warners' star biographer, Director William Dieterle, Juarez is a bright new feather in an already well-decorated cap.

Union Pacific (Paramount) is constructed, from sandbox to coupling pins, of cinematic materials as standard as those that went into the railroad it celebrates. Its most dramatic sequence is a new version of Thomas Alva Edison's 1903 production, The Great Train Robbery, the first story-telling picture ever made. Union Pacific also has: an Indian massacre; a pursuit on horseback; a race across a burning bridge; an old-fashioned triangle plot of sacrifice and misunderstanding. But when, like its subject, it triumphantly ends its journey at Utah's Promontory Point, it has carried a full payload of first-rate screen entertainment.

If Union Pacific reminds veteran cinemaddicts of many another picture, that is not strange. Paramount's 1,200th picture, it was produced and directed by the same man who made its first (The Squaw Man) 26 years ago. Union Pacific is the 65th picture Cecil Blount DeMille has directed, the 212th he has produced. Some signs that Producer-Director DeMille, who at 58 still affects the leather puttees and riding breeches of his salad days, is still going strong:

> To get authentic 1860 rolling stock for Union Pacific, he bought his equipment from Nevada's Virginia & Truckee Railway, which hauled $700,000,000 in gold and silver from Comstock Lode, got an ICC railroad operator's license to transport V&T's 37 vintage cars to location (at 15 m.p.h.). > He persuaded 700 reluctant Piutes, Sioux, Cheyennes and Navahos, some of whom had steady jobs on WPA to work in breechclouts, despite low temperatures Chuckled Mr. DeMille when the thermometer once approached zero: "First time I ever saw a red man turn blue." > Disliking the looks of contemporary Cheyenne, he built a pioneer Cheyenne to his taste at Iron Springs, Utah. > Dissatisfied with the color of the California dirt for track-laying purposes, he had it sprayed with chocolate paint.

Typically DeMille in its lavishness, Union Pacific officially cost Paramount "more than a million dollars," though it did not, despite Hollywood wags, cost more than the railroad itself. DeMille budgets are the result of an overmastering passion for detail and a policy of shooting everything in sight. Of the 205,000 feet of film exposed for Union Pacific, DeMille and his cutter, Anne Bauchens, threw away all but 12,158. On the set DeMille manipulates his mobs through a special public-address system. When unit directors go to remote locations, he stays in Hollywood, keeps in constant touch by telephone and through emissaries described (by Manhattan's elegant railroad amateur Lucius Beebe, a technical adviser on Union Pacific) as "the king's messengers." Traditionally the best actor and dramatic writer on any DeMille set, DeMille is usually patient, sometimes disconcerting. When two minor Union Pacific actors began an argument as to which should laugh louder in a scene, DeMille startled them by screaming: "Jumping Piltdown elephants! Let's not make an epic out of two grunts!"

To get Union Pacific off to a rolling start last week in Omaha, where the Union Pacific got off to a slow start 74 years ago, Omaha's town fathers agreed to commemorate both events with a Golden Spike celebration. Some 20,000 Omahans joined "whiskers clubs" to act as unpaid extras, Omaha's obliging womenfolk togged themselves out in 1869 costumes, Omaha's stores and bars were flimflammed with pioneer signs and doodads. The school board decreed two Golden Spike holidays. Omaha's Roman Catholic Bishop James Hugh Ryan dispensed his flock from eating fish on Friday. Fearing that its press-agentry would be submerged in the civic celebrations, Paramount loaded Barbara Stanwyck and some of Union Pacific's cast (but not Joel McCrea, under contract to jealous and immovable Producer Samuel Goldwyn) on a train which triumphantly journeyed from Los Angeles, was mobbed even at unscheduled stops along its 1,800-mile route by exuberant crowds, many of whom sported whiskers and 1869 costumes.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Dark Victory (Bette Davis, George Brent, Geraldine Fitzgerald; TIME, May 1).

Wuthering Heights (Merle Oberon, Lawrence Olivier, David Niven; TIME, April 17).

The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Lew Fields; TIME, April 10).

Alexander Nevsky (Nikolai Cherkassov; TIME, April 3).

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce; TIME, April 3).

Made for Each Other (Carole Lombard, James Stewart; TIME, Feb. 27).

Pygmalion (Leslie Howard, Wendy Killer; TIME, Dec. 5).

-Now played at the opening and closing of all Warner Bros, theatres.

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