The New Pictures

Journey's End (Tiffany). Many difficulties confronted the small but ambitious and able Tiffany-Stahl Productions in making a cinema of Robert Cedric Sherriff's famed play. It is a play containing a remote love-interest, but without a woman in the cast and without the possibility of allowing the entrance of any, unless Captain Stanhope's unseen sweetheart should ride through the lines in a coach, like Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac. Furthermore, it offers no chance for photography. All the action takes place in the dugout of the officers of C Company; any scenes taken outside this setting are unnecessary. Even the scenes of trench warfare, which to stage audiences were represented by powder smells and the operation of noise- machines, lose significance through being specifically portrayed.

Despite these obstacles, Journey's End as a talking picture is a sensitive, faithful and brilliant photograph of a great War play. The story is a pattern loosely and skillfully woven around the lives and characters of certain British officers in a front line sector--their amusements, memories, meals, relations to each other--all unified by the abstract presence of a power bent on destroying them, and which does in the end destroy them. These soldiers are heroic, but with a kind of heroism never before depicted on the screen--a makeshift heroism, concocted in despair as the best way to behave in circumstances which are absurd, insane, horrible. Captain Stanhope is played by Colin Clive, who has the part in the stage Journey's End in London; the rest of the excellent cast was recruited in Hollywood. Last shot: the scene darker, the shelling outside harder, the only sign of life in the dugout a guttering candle, which slowly goes out.

Colin Clive is a descendant of Lord Robert Clive, famed 18th Century campaigner who "won India for England," stalemated the crooked politicians of his time, and committed suicide when he was 50. Like other Clives, Colin was sent to Sandhurst (Royal Military College of England). One day he broke his knee at riding maneuvers. Because the knee stiffened after it healed, he was disqualified for a commission. A good-looking fellow, he got some stage jobs, played in London companies of Rose Marie, Show Boat, The Way of an Eagle. Last year he married a French actress named Jeanne de Casalis. He was given six weeks' leave of absence from the London Journey's End company to make this picture in Hollywood.

The Girl Said No (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This comedy, familiar in formula, takes a handsome girl and an irresponsible young man through a series of incidents at the end of which, as a crowning comic twist, he gets the girl. Some of William Haines's antics seem dictated less by fantasy than by pathology, but the consciousness that in actual life any one of his little jokes would be reason enough for his being shot or locked up, stimulates rather than hinders the humor. Best shots: an unnamed player as a frightened waiter who is ordered by his employer to make a noise like a cat when addressing a patron who is supposed to be crazy; Haines selling bonds to a spinster.

In the Next Room (First National). This is slightly better fun thau most program mystery-melodramas. It begins in 1889, with a carefully dated prolog showing a husband of the period getting rid of his wife's lover in a mysterious and dreadful manner. Newspaper clippings bring up to date the dark history of the Manhattan house where this happening took place to 1929, where the modern mystery phase begins, involving the usual detectives, reporters, antique cabinets, stolen jewels, corpses. Best shot: the farewell of the lover of 1889.

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