The New Pictures

The Lost Patrol (British). There was material for a masterpiece in the situation of these eleven soldiers on the Sahara desert. They had been riding under sealed orders to an unknown destination. A sniper kills their lieutenant and the Arabs steal their horses. Nothing can save them from dying or being shot down on the colorless sand, under the sun like a furnace door, and die they do, one by one--an artist, a vaudeville trouper, a farmer, a clerk, a wagon driver, a prizefighter, an evangelist. Their reactions to the death sentence and the way in which the sentence is executed on each of them is the subject of The Lost Patrol.

Exploitation matter for the picture states that it was made at places in the desert where the temperature was "never less than 120DEG." It is too bad that this heat, or something, made Director Walter Summers, known for his competent war newsreels, mess up this opportunity. The characters are never properly identified; the flashbacks into their lives are jerky and incomplete. Best shot: the evangelist going crazy and running out into the desert to die.

The Marriage Playground (Paramount). What happens to children in families that have a penchant for divorces was the subject of a novel (The Children) by Edith Wharton which this picture reproduces faithfully. Mrs. Wharton's professional, knowingly maternal sympathy, her bookish characters, even the glossy feeling of her style, are in The Marriage Playground. It is handsomely staged, conscientiously acted, unreal, inane. Numerous precocious stage children do their specialties as Mary Brian, the oldest and best-looking of the family, gives them their cues. Silliest shot: the cocktail council on the beach.

Die Meistersinger (German). It is hard to tell whether the story of the cobbler and the city clerk of Nuremberg who loved a girl who loved neither of them would have been better or worse if Wagner's immortal but cinematically difficult music had been recorded around it. The poetry, of course, is in the music rather than the anecdote. This poetry is lost, but the silent Meistersinger moves with a light-footedness impossible in grand opera. Clearly these capable German actors like their. material and understand it. They play the old roles slyly, fast and broadly --the whimsical Hans Sachs, the vicious Beckmesser, the hesitating Pogner. Good shots: the fracas outside Hans Sachs' shop; Beckmesser appearing before the Grand Council without his toupee.

This Thing Called Love (Pathe).

Shrewd rather than witty, this comedy of marriage succeeds in being entertaining because Edwin Burke, from whose play it was adapted, sensibly avoided the deeper implications of his subject. The idea of it is that married people get along better if they are not in love with each other. A girl who has seen her sister become possessive, jealous, dissatisfied because she was in love with her husband, makes a business deal with a gentleman, stipulating that she is to run his home and live with him at a salary of $25,000 and all expenses paid. The reversal, created when her attitude toward the second party in this contract becomes sentimental, shows how eventually she shares the troubles of less reasonable women. Best shot: pretty Constance Bennett making terms.

Richard Bennett has three daughters--Constance, Joan, and Barbara. He grew up in the middle west, left the Kokomo. Ind., High School and became a prizefighter, then tried tailoring, gambling, tent medicine shows. His eventual fame as an actor made him able to give his girls another kind of background. They grew up in rich communities and went to fashionable schools. At country club dances and college proms--especially between dances--Connie Bennett, a big-eyed, knowing, bow-lipped blonde, created an atmosphere and a tradition all her own. to the indignation of the watching mothers of less gifted daughters. Joan took to the stage and was her father's leading woman in Jarnegan. Barbara liked Continental life. With the late Dancer Maurice (Maurice Oscar Louis Mouvet) in Le Jardin de Ma Soeur in Paris she danced little tangos and foxtrots filled with such a gay caprice that people said Maurice had found, by a miracle, a partner as lovely as his dead wife, Leonora Hughes. Constance worked for various film companies as a free lance in important roles but stopped after marrying Philip Plant, one of the richest of the rich young men who had followed her around to parties in her debutante days. She and Plant were divorced fortnight ago. She signed a five-year contract with Pathe after the company had put in a clause allowing her to take a three-month holiday every year whenever she wants it. Some of her other pictures are The Goose Woman, Marriage, Rich People.

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