The New Pictures

A Dangerous Woman (Paramount). When Adolph Zukor, president of Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., noticed the original title of this picture, The Woman Who Needed Killing, he called in advertising spreads which had cost a lot of money and renamed it himself. That any woman should need killing seemed to him an indictment of womanhood in general, perhaps of motherhood. Adolph Zukor would not stand for anything like that although he was probably forced to admit that Olga Baclanova, in this instance, acted badly. The wife of an Englishman in Africa, she flirted with her husband's friends and finally with his brother. Clive Brook does not kill himself after all because he finds that Mme. Baclanova's perhaps necessary death in the last scene was not caused by the poison he put in her lime-juice but by a snakebite. Throughout this silly, badly directed, exciting picture Mme. Baclanova depicts an unpleasant character by wearing beautiful clothes, telling love stories, singing in a dramatic soprano voice that was once justly celebrated in Moscow. Silliest shots: the hysterical colonist who complains that Africa is strangling him; Baclanova whimpering with passion to the strophe of African drums.

The Black Watch (Fox). One more of those English officers torn between love and patriotism goes back to his regiment on New Year's Eve a gentleman and a major. Victor McLaglen's inexperience as an interpreter of erotic reactions is made up for by Myrna Loy and by photography of the Khyber Pass and its adjacent wastes that is much too good for the story. Best shot: The tribesmen mobilizing.*

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The job of making the artificially connected episodes of Thornton Wilder's fantasy into visual drama has been done well--so well that this picture, unlike most of those based on successful books, will appeal chiefly to people who have read the story. The brightly colored insubstantial characters--the disordered old Marquesa, tormented with love for a daughter who does not like her; the novice (Raquel Torres) who could no longer see Christ clear because she loved Estaban, the letter writer; Estaban, who found the world empty when his brother Manuel died; Manuel, infatuated with La Perichole (Lily Damita); Uncle Pio (Ernest Torrence), dismissed at last by the girl he has made famous--come to life in an imaginary country filled with splendid metaphors. Director Charles Brabin has translated these metaphors into concrete objects and scenery which give the cinema a reality not possible in written words. The emotional pitch of the story--a pitch originally far and not always convincingly above the pitch of prose life--becomes merely the concentration necessary for getting so many lives and deaths into the hour-and-a-quarter of a feature picture. A sermon clipping the beginning and the end of the action makes clear that the death of the characters on the breaking bridge, coming at a moment of frustration for each of them, is proof of divine mercy. Best shots: Lily Damita dictating a letter to a bull fighter; Raquel Torres saying goodbye to Estaban.

Lily Damita's dancing is colorful and sophisticated in this picture. She learned her dancing before critical audiences in Spain, France (her birthplace), Germany, Holland, Greece. Aged 21, she has been dancing for 16 years, has already starred at the Paris Casino.

Producers wonder whether Damita will do as well in most talking pictures, for she talks with a French accent. She is proud of that. Her father died at Chemin des Dames, fighting for France. Lately, she said she would marry a man who calls him self Louis Ferdinand and who worked until last week as a laborer in Henry Ford's Los Angeles assembly plant (TIME, May 27), then betook himself to Buenos Aires be cause of "family interference." His accent is German. Once he was known as Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of the deposed Kaiser.

Variations

Lion. Best newsreel shot of the week --a lion family under a rock; a male lion dragging a dead zebra through the bushes; taken in Africa by a Mr. & Mrs. Cron, amateurs, and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Union. In Hollywood last week, cameramen proclaimed a union, insisted on a minimum salary of $200 per week for chief cameramen on feature productions.

Favorites. In Manhattan the readers of the tabloid Daily News, most circulated paper in the U. S., voted Clara Bow their favorite picture actress, Greta Garbo second, then Joan Crawford, Vilma Banky, Nancy Carroll, Mary Pickford, Dolores del Rio, Dolores Costello, Janet Gaynor, Colleen Moore. A quarter-million cinemaseers in London lately voted Ronald Colman the actor they liked best, Betty Balfour, a British girl with mannerisms learned from U. S. flappers, the most popular actress; then, in order by pairs, Richard Dix and Dolores del Rio, Douglas Fairbanks and Clara Bow, Adolphe Menjou and Laura La Plante, Sydney Chaplin and Esther Ralston. Of the English women who voted, 70% did not like talkies; half the men liked them.

*Khyber Pass--most strategic of the passes which lead from Afghanistan into India--is a defile more than 20 miles long, and at one point 15 ft. narrow, 2,000 ft. deep, winding between cliffs of shale and limestone. It has been a scene of attacks and sieges since the times of Alexander the Great, of JenghiS Khan. Britain's Afghan wars and Poet Rudyard Kipling brought the Khyber to occidental fame.