The New Pictures

My Love Came Back (Warner) is based on the supposition that if a group of down-at-lip jazzbabies suddenly began swinging such melodies as Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, a Chopin Nocturne, and Mendelssohn's violin Concerto in E Minor, their daring would astound and conquer the musical world. Such a feat bowls over Amelia Cornell (Olivia de Havilland), who has a violin scholarship in a conservatory and at first explains that she will hear no music that is not "classical." When Amelia in turn bowls over the conservatory's goatish old patron (Charles Winninger), his son, and the dignified young manager of his radio factory (Jeffrey Lynn), the score is ready for a mildly entertaining melange of melody and misunderstanding.

Jeffrey Lynn is a onetime photographer's model who still acts as though he were afraid of scaring the birdie. He behaves more timidly than usual when Cinemactress de Havilland scowls at him over the bridge of her fiddle. Piqued at her assignments on her return to Warners from her success as Melanie in Gone With the Wind, Miss de Havilland flounced out of the studio. Brought flouncing back by suspension (the big stick with which the Warner Brothers have subdued Bette Davis, Priscilla Lane, James Cagney, Ann Sheridan), spunky Miss de Havilland kept the Brothers and her fellow players guessing about her grudging promise not to elope with James Stewart during the six weeks filming.

Time in the Sun (Marie Seton). "As you watch, you are ready to believe that Eisenstein has indeed created the supreme masterpiece up-to-date of the movies." So wrote Critic Edmund Wilson in 1932 after a sneak preview of part of the 150,000 feet of film (feature length: around 8,000 ft.) which talkative, fuzzy-headed Director Sergei Michailovich Eisenstein, the Soviet Union's gift to cinema, had shot during a 14-month sojourn in Mexico.

Something short of a masterpiece was Thunder Over Mexico, which Upton Sinclair and other backers got old Hollywood hand Sol Lesser to patch together from their cinematic mountain after Director Eisenstein quarreled with Sinclair and went huffing back to Russia (TIME, May 2, 1932). But U. S. radicals, who accused Sinclair and Lesser of sabotage, and other admirers of Director Eisenstein persisted in the belief that Critic Wilson was right. Their laments made the movie Eisenstein had originally projected as Viva Mexico the most celebrated incomplete work of art since Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. The news that it was to be cut up into travelogs and Latin American background shots was widely condemned as a typical Hollywood desecration.

Last year in Hollywood appeared trig, thirtyish Marie Seton, a British cinema critic who had produced a documentary film history of animation in pictures and had talked with Eisenstein about his ideas for his lost masterpiece. To her surprise, she found its matrix practically intact in a Hollywood vault, bought all she wanted (16,000 ft.) for $3,500. When her original plan to get the picture to Eisenstein for cutting and editing went awry, she went to work herself. Soon finding the jigsaw unmanageable, Producer Seton journeyed to Mexico to retrace the itinerary which Eisenstein and his cameraman Edouard Tisse had followed in a jalopy, shooting on sunny days and drinking beer on rainy days. Natives, their memory refreshed by bits of film, remembered acting for Eisenstein eight years before, told what they had done and why. The pieces began to fall into place. Back in the U. S., Producer Seton added a sound track composed of Mexican music and a three-voice commentary. When she had finished, her budget just topped $15,000.

If Time in the Sun is still not the cinema's supreme masterpiece, it is an arresting, superbly photographed, richly imaginative picture. Eisenstein saw Mexico as a pyramid, the frenetic Spanish life of its upper classes resting on a dark, broad Indian base, so stratified that its history did not have to be remembered, could be seen directly by the camera. The Old Mexico of the Mayans, before the upsurge of the industrious, masterful Aztecs, lives in a burial rite in Yucatan. The Aztecs themselves fall before the Spaniards, who bring with them a religion and an economy which dominates Mexico for 400 years. Episodes are eloquent: a lusty young matador praying before he enters the arena; a Jesuit preaching from the steps of a cathedral built on the foundation of an Aztec temple; a hacendado appropriating the betrothed of a peon, who is stamped to death by horsemen when he rebels (the incident spun into Thunder Over Mexico). In 1911 Diaz falls, and the Indian begins to absorb his masters.

To Eisenstein, the Indian Spirit is expressed by the matter-of-fact good nature of a wedding in Tehuantepec, the half-blasphemous burlesque of death in the festival of All Souls' Day, when brown- bellied moppets are scared into tears by processions of grinning skeletons, console themselves with little candy skulls, and everyone has a wonderful time.

Producer Seton, who disarms criticism by declaring that she still thinks Eisenstein should have finished his picture himself, hopes to salvage an archaeological short from her unused footage. After that she plans to make two pictures herself: a short on Leonardo da Vinci, to be subsidized by Manhattan's American Film Centre, and a documentary on the American Indian.

Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) marks Mickey Rooney's ninth appearance as bratty Andy Hardy, his first since he was crowned King of the Screen and the No. 1 box-office attraction of the U. S. cinema. More believable as Andy than as young Tom Edison, Cinemactor Rooney mugs his way from Carvel to Manhattan to make good on a boast that he is acquainted with a glamorous bud named Daphne Fowler (Diana Lewis). The Judge (Lewis Stone), nominally heading the expedition, is engaged on a legal chore thoroughly in keeping with the Hardy character: protecting the trust fund that supports the Carvel orphanage. Cocks of the walk in Carvel, the Hardys are beset but not conquered by plushy lawyers and frosty headwaiters. Everyone encounters preliminary tribulations before Andy gets to see Daphne through the intercession of the Hardys' old friend Betsy Booth (Judy Garland). After the required footage, Andy wins his chastening triumph, the Judge wins his case.

As such oldsters as Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore and Lewis Stone have discovered, Mickey Rooney thrives on his ability and determination to steal anything up to a death scene from a colleague. Some of Cinemactor Stone's heartiest chuckles may be explained by the fact that 17-year-old Judy Garland, growing prettier by the picture and armed for this one with two good songs, Alone and I'm Nobody's Baby, treats Mickey with a dose of his own medicine.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Tom Brown's School Days (Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Freddie Bartholomew, Jimmy Lydon; TIME, July 8).

The Mortal Storm (Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan, Robert Young, Irene Rich, Maria Ouspenskaya; TIME, July i).

Our Town (William Holden, Martha Scott, Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter, Guy Kibbee, Beulah Bondi, Frank Craven; TIME, June 3).

Rebecca (Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson, George Sanders, C. Aubrey Smith; TIME, April 15).

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