The New Pictures

(See front cover)

City Lights (United Artists). It is almost a law in publicity-loving Southern California that the two greatest personalities there present shall hobnob while the press & public loudly cheer or jeer. Usually this means William Randolph Hearst and whatever foreign personage happens to be visiting Hollywood. But last week it meant Charles Spencer Chaplin and Albert Einstein. All of Hollywood's police reserves turned out one evening to make tunnels through the populace so that Mr. Chaplin could escort Dr. Einstein and a party of scientists to see the first new Chaplin film in two years.

Hollywood is volatile, jealous and perhaps sinful. But it is intensely loyal to the little man whom it used to call Charlie before the wide world called him Chariot, Carlos, Cha-pu-rin and as many more variations as there are languages. Had City Lights been a failure, Hollywood would have been personally and bitterly depressed. But Hollywood was not depressed. Neither was it frightened. For though City Lights is a successful silent challenge to the talkies, its success derives solely from the little man with the battered hat, bamboo cane and black mustache. Critics agree that he, whose posterior would probably be recognized by more people throughout the world than would recognize any other man's face, will be doing business after talkies have been traded in for television.

City Lights is not silent in the strictest sense. Synchronized sound effects and music are used beginning with the very first sequence, where the talkies are burlesqued by horn sounds that make the actors seem to be talking with their mouths full of mush. Also there is an episode where Mr. Chaplin swallows a whistle. Each time he coughs he whistles and he cannot stop coughing. Taxis hurry up and stop, dogs overwhelm him. Hollywood also grew hysterical during a prizefight in which Charlie survives two rounds by dodging so briskly that the referee is always between him and his murderous opponent.

To thread together these and kindred quaint inventions the picture tells the story of a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill). He falls in love with her, encouraging her to believe he is a millionaire. His difficulties in getting funds to maintain this reputation in her unseeing eyes supply most of the complications. He finally acquires $1.000 for which he is promptly and unjustly jailed. When he emerges she has regained her sight by the aid of the thousand. As the film fades she recognizes in the ragged helpless vagrant the wealthy prince she dreamed about in darkness.

A "running gag"* much admired by Hollywood experts is built up in a millionaire who, when drunk, is Chaplin's dearest friend; when sober, has him thrown out of the house. A new gag: Chaplin trying to light his cigar but succeeding only in lighting the cigar which another character is waving airily before his face. As in all

Chaplin films there are touches of smut: Chaplin as a busy street cleaner seeing an endless troop of mules, hurrying in the opposite direction, only to meet an elephant; Chaplin acting girlish toward a prize fighter stripping for battle.

Cinema is primarily an industry, secondarily an art. Squat, tasteful red brick buildings in the heart of Hollywood are the physical evidences of Chaplin's supremacy as industrialist as well as artist. Chaplin finances his own pictures and shrewdly supervises their sale and distribution. He writes them, casts them, directs them. He works by mood. He shoots thousands upon thousands of feet of film, saving perhaps 50 feet that he feels is right. When things go wrong he stops work and plays tennis. Sometimes he works all night. He listens to a great lot of advice, disregards most of it. Sometimes his spasmodic working habits bewilder his subordinates. To ease their minds he has instructed a special studio watchman to keep a lookout for his car and swiftly warn the workers of its approach. Thus laggards will not lose their self-respect by having the boss catch them in a poker game.

Chaplin does not reject the sound-device because he does not think his voice will register. His objection is that cinema is essentially a pantomimic art. Says he: "Action is more generally understood than words. Like the Chinese symbolism it will mean different things according to its scenic connotation. Listen to a description of some unfamiliar object--an African wart hog, for example. Then look at a picture of the animal and see how surprised you are."

City Lights cost $1.500.000 to produce Before release it had sold to a guaranteed booking of more than $4,000.000. Chaplin worked frantically to make it his greatest, to justify his faith in pantomime. Chance guests would be hauled into his projection room to see rushes of the film. They were asked to describe what they had seen. If they missed a point that was intended to be clear Chaplin--feeling that his story must be understood by everyone, even the stupid or the distracted--would have the scene refilmed. In rest intervals he would play "Violetera" on his harmonium and sing an imitation of Spanish words to it in the manner of Raquel Meller. One afternoon he nearly lost his mustache. He has had the same one for 15 years. A Manhattan theatrical barber picked it out for him. He says that if he ever loses it he will play smooth shaven. On this day he came in just in time to see a guest about to throw the mustache away, mistaking it for hair combings on Chaplin's makeup table.

Finn and Hattie (Paramount). This is a loose improvisation based on some incidents in Donald Ogden Stewart's Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad. It is not as funny as it ought to be partly because it follows the hackneyed formula of a naive U. S. couple seeing Europe for the first time, partly because of the unnecessary subplot involving Lilyan Tashman as an adventuress who tries to steal $50.000 from Mr. Haddock, and precocious Mitzi Green, who frustrates the conspiracy. It is funny when the insane hilarity of Author Stewart is permitted to come to the surface: Mr. Haddock (Leon Errol) wrestling with a brakeman in an empty car; Mrs. Haddock (Zazu Pitts) overcome with seasickness induced by autosuggestion while the boat is still at the dock; both of them indulging in polite social chatter with a street-cleaner to whom they have been introduced by a taxidriver.

The Bachelor Father (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A bachelor, lonely in his old age, invites his illegitimate children of various nationalities to come and live with him. One of them--the one he feels is most like him--turns out to be not his daughter after all. Such components were all right when Belasco produced The Bachelor Father on Broadway but they offered a grave moral problem to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That great organization rose brilliantly to the emergency, however; they changed the bachelor into a married man. The comedy has lost some of its pace, but the circumloquacious dialog has a certain wit and the whole pro: duction is filled with pretty scenery, pretty clothes. Marion Davies enjoys herself in a role that did not take much thought. Best sequences: the children remolding their father along modern lines.

The Royal Bed (Warner). They have been so careful with this that it is not funny at all. On the stage as The Queen's Husband, it was scintillating comedy, and since few liberties have been taken with Robert Sherwood's story it is hard to see why this elaborate photograph of a good play should be so dull. Lowell Sherman, the director, also acts the king who, bullied by his ministers and his wife, finds his only pleasure in cheating a little as he plays checkers with the palace flunkeys. When the Queen goes away and a revolution breaks out he sides with the people. By the end of the film he has thrown the dictator out, put the radical leader in his place, married the princess to the plumber. If Actor-Director Sherman had stuck to the mood of drawing-room satire in which the play was written he might have been successful; as it stands The Royal Bed falls to bits between Graustarkian romance, farce, and heavy-footed satire. Best shot: the Queen's reminiscences of her trip to the U. S.

Seas Beneath (Fox). Even spectators not qualified to pass on the accuracy of detail of the naval warfare shown here will have a strong suspicion that Director John Ford has romanticized. All the action is highly theatrical: a jumble of spywork, gunfire, carousal, submarine heroism, with some brilliant photography of sea-scenes. The photography is all that recommends it, for the dialog is inept and the story of the Mystery Ship sent out as decoy for a German submarine and the beautiful German spy who loves a U. S. officer but sees him kill her brother in the course of duty, gets laughs in the wrong places. There is no one of note in the cast. Best shot: sinking the U-172.

Going Wild (Warner). One of the most frightening experiences undergone by people who are learning to fly is "ground-fear"--the conviction that if they try to land the plane they will crack it up. In the case of Comic Joe E. Brown the conviction is not purely neurotic, for he has never flown before. He is a reporter who has been mistaken for a famed ace. Going Wild is a mildly amusing, derivative comedy whose laughs do not compensate for long stretches of dullness. Laura Lee is the girl. Best shot: the plane crashing while Brown and his sweetheart come down in a parachute.

* A piece of business or dialog often repeated.

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