The New Pictures

Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (Warner Bros.) is 606, the arsenical compound that the dumpy, cigar-puffing Jewish genius found he could shoot into syphilitics and kill the pale spirochetes of syphilis without killing their victim. Warner Brothers have long been afraid that the bullet might ricochet from the Hays Office, the State censorship boards, the U. S. cinemillions conditioned to regard any mention of syphilis as indecent. Consulted in advance, after a fortnight's solemn thought the Hays experts spoke. Their verdict: the word syphilis must be mentioned as seldom as possible in the picture; on no account must 606 be used in the title; where possible, other terms must be used for 606.

Carefully Scenarists Heinz Herold, Norman Burnside, John Huston combed their script, removed twelve references to syphilis. Nevertheless, for the first time the U. S. movie-going public will hear the word syphilis uttered in a legitimate Hollywood film.

They will see and hear much more. Brilliantly directed by William Dieterle (The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola) and acted by a top-notch cast, The Magic Bullet is another refutation of critics who say Hollywood is allergic to social content in films. Like Pasteur and Zola, The Magic Bullet is loaded with social meaning. Like them, it is first and foremost absorbing entertainment.

As brusque, bearded, puttering Dr. Ehrlich, Edward G. Robinson gives a conscientious performance, which, without the flashes of dramatic insight that make Paul Muni a great actor, is also without the self-conscious mannerisms that some times turn Muni's art into artiness.

Ruth Gordon, recently brought from Broadway to Hollywood to play shrewish Mary Todd Lincoln, plays an even more difficult role as self-effacing Frau Ehrlich, and plays it better. By shadings of voice, gesture, glance, she becomes the wife who, excluded from her famous husband's death chamber by the presence of his great colleagues and his physician, sits playing the simplest of German love songs: Du, du liegst mir im Herzen. When she can be alone with him at last, he is dead. And her closing of the door upon herself and his body is the picture's last great directorial touch.

But as Dr. Ehrlich's colleague, Dr. Robert Koch, the discoverer of the anthrax bacillus, 70-year old German Refugee Albert Basserman gives the picture's outstanding performance. The alert tilt of his head, his probing eyes, even his wary stance are an embodiment of the professional scientific skeptic, who is not unwilling to believe, but has to be shown. Once Ehrlich has shown him, he becomes a gracious, humane old man, remains professionally a skeptic.

Whether Ehrlich's laboratory assistant (Edward Norris) really turned himself into a human guinea pig, inoculated himself with 606 after it had worked on an ape, is unimportant. To criticisms of such free handling of biography in his pictures, Director Dieterle long ago wrote the best answer. Said he: ".. . The dramatization of a man's life is condensing, and not copying, the historical facts. It is the steam, and not the water, that moves the engine."

Swiss Family Robinson (RKO) submits for the timely consideration of cinemaddicts the example of the famed Swiss family which fled from the Napoleonic wars to the peace of a South Sea islet. It also makes clear that flight to the tropical paradise will not be all coconut milk and honey if mother and the children are more given to urban ways than to the Tolstoyan delights of wood turning, leather tanning and animal husbandry.

When the scripting team of Gene Towne and Graham Baker announced that it would film Swiss Family Robinson as its first fling at producing, story-starved Hollywood gasped with admiration, wondered why Johann Rudolf Wyss's century-old best-seller had been overlooked so long. The wonder has abated. Even versatile Gene Towne is hard put to it to make the uneventful life of Eden entertaining for 93 minutes. He is equally hard-pressed to keep the book's romantic inspirations from seeming merely grotesque when viewed by the literal lens of a camera. A tame ostrich (apocryphally discovered dwelling in a South Sea jungle) taught to haul timber, a stuffed turtle towing a raft-load of gleeful Robinsons will divert children. For older boys there is always Mother Robinson (Edna Best) cavorting around in a pair of buckskin slacks.

Other high spots of the picture:

> Jack (Freddie Bartholomew) proudly displaying to his brothers (Tim Holt, Terry Kilburn) three hairs on his chest (grimly portending the shape of things to come in Master Freddie's screen career).

> Father Robinson (Thomas Mitchell) piously announcing that, as they have two of each kind of domestic animal, their livestock will increase and multiply. Anguished chorus of Robinson boys: "Our flocks will, but how about us?"

Cherub-faced, hot-tempered, earnest Thomas Mitchell likes to describe himself as a man "with two arms, two eyes, two ears and an appetite like anyone else." He is not like anyone else. Cinemacting is only his favorite role. He has also been: 1) a newspaperman; 2) a vaudevillian; 3) a stage actor; 4) a stage director; 5) a scripter.

Born 44 years ago in Elizabeth, N. J., Mitchell went to work for Newark's Journal when the Mitchell family could no longer stand his rehearsing amateur parts at home. The Journal could not stand the retractions and libel suits its imaginative new hand kept getting his paper into. Later other papers felt the same way. So young Tom switched to vaudeville. Then he landed a job with Ben Greet's Shakespearean players, followed by two years of carrying Shakespeare to U. S. college campuses in the company of Charles Coburn. By 1920, Mitchell had played some 55 Shakespearean roles, has played none since.

Mitchell's first authoring job was a collaboration with Lee Tracy, who had an idea for a play, could not get it beyond Act I. The result was Glory Hallelujah, the flop that introduced Tracy to Broad way. Next Tom Mitchell dramatized Novelist Floyd Dell's Little Accident, a hit, which Mitchell directed and acted in. He also wrote a play of his own, Cloudy With Showers, bought and shelved by Paramount. By the time he closed his stage career by going to Hollywood to play in Lost Horizon (1936), Tom Mitchell had played more than 1,000 parts in 25 years.

A year and a half at Columbia, a year with excitable Sam Goldwyn, who dropped him, and Mitchell started on the active, highly profitable free-lancing which has kept him busy ever since.

Mitchell lives so quietly in Hollywood's fashionable Riviera district that most of his big-name neighbors hardly know he is there. In talk-teeming Hollywood he is rarely talked about. When he was divorced from Anne Stuart Brown, his first (and only) wife last fall, few people heard of it. He has a married daughter, 22. Few people have ever heard him mention her.

No athlete, he goes walking for exercise, prefers talking. This he does over many a scotch-and-soda at Dave Chasen's Holly wood saloon, with such other prevailingly Celtic men's men as Jimmie Cagney, Pat O'Brien, Walter Connolly.

Though Mitchell likes books, he does not collect them. Like Edward G. Robinson he collects pictures, has bought a few Picassos, Utrillos, Modiglianis. Much upset was Art Collector Mitchell over a recent publicity story which credited him with laying out $6,500 of his Swiss Family Robinson earnings for a Modigliani. His mail was quickly flooded with requests for aid, rebukes for spendthriftiness. The Modigliani, explains Mr. Mitchell deprecatingly, really cost only $4,500.

Cinemactor Mitchell prefers the screen to the stage (the movies, he says, "can tell the same thing for fifty cents, and make it move") and the movies have been rewarding him with bigger & better parts. Three of his best (though not biggest): the whiskey-soaked doctor in Stagecoach; the whiskey-soured idealist newshawk in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; rollicking Gerald O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, where Mitchell's demented pantomime dominated the later scenes at Tara.

He has had meatier roles than somewhat priggishly pious Father Robinson in the Swiss Family Robinson, and nobody knows it better than part-smart Tom Mitchell. Says he: "The way he prayed every 30 minutes scared the -- out of me."

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