The New Pictures

Alexander Hamilton (Warner) is an historical play in the grand manner. Its dramatis personae includes George & Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Senator Roberts, Count Talleyrand, Philip Schuyler, John Jay and Betsy Hamilton, in addition to the first Secretary of the Treasury who is impersonated by no less a personage than George Arliss. Distending his nostrils and speaking in the scrupulous accents which last year got him a gold medal for "diction." Cinemactor Arliss, who was also co-author of the play on which the cinema was based, revels in the intrigues, political and amorous, which preceded the passage of Hamilton's Assumption Bill. He foils the efforts of catchpenny opponents to make him withdraw this wise legislation (by which the U. S. Government assumed war debts contracted by the 13 colonies) and is at last congratulated on its passage by a caucus of colonial celebrities including President Washington.

Historical plays usually depend on a blend of politics and escapade which is not likely to end happily in real life. In this picture, Hamilton's adversaries try to trick him into a scandal by sending an adventuress to cajole him into misbehavior. Hamilton is cajoled but he survives the scandal. He even preserves the loyalty of his wife by placing upon her clothes, which she is packing to leave him, a sprig of rosemary. A potent agent in the cinema for what is Good, True & Beautiful, Cinemactor Arliss thus confers a dubious benison on U. S. schoolchildren by showing them with what simple tricks a dignitary of the golden age could turn his cavalier indiscretions into a triumph of patriotism fit for Muzzey's Reader. Nonetheless, the film will interest many and bore only those who have rooted objections to sentimentalized history. Good shot : Arliss dancing a minuet with Betsy (Doris Kenyon).

Side Show (Warner). The romance of the circus, the glamour of sawdust, calliopes, and spangles has long been celebrated in song & story but particularly in stories written for the cinema. This one follows the accepted outline. It gives glimpses of a circus train in motion; a plump bibulous circus-proprietor; a moth-eaten lion ; a fight in which the circus performers are attacked by the population of a small town and they defend themselves with brickbats and fists, shouting the traditional "Hey, Rube!" loudly and frequently. The local color is not new but it is fairly well done. The story itself, about two sisters, one an old trouper, the other a school girl on vacation, both of them attached to a handsome young barker, seems as moth-eaten as the lion. Winnie Lightner, hitherto blatant and unfunny comedienne, does well by the part of the elder sister. Charles Butterworth is also connected with the circus in some undefined and probably undefinable capacity. When he shells peas, they bounce out of the pot into which he drops them. In The Bargain (TIME, Sept. 14). Butterworth wore a colonial costume which made him look like George Arliss slightly out of focus. In this picture, he wears a derby hat which is less becoming. Good shots: Butterworth voicing his absurd hunger for "a nice bowl of tapioca"; then falling into a small, shallow tank from a 110 ft. tower ; the proprietor going to bed drunk.

The Squaw Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Cecil Blount De Mille is the most veteran of Hollywood directors and The Squaw Man is his favorite picture. He made it first in 1913. eight years after William Faversham and William S. Hart played it on the stage, with Dustin Farnum in the hero's role. Four years later De Mille coaxed Elliot Dexter and Jack Holt through its sequences of sacrifice and agony. His feeling for his reiterative classic has now come to resemble that of an after-dinner orator for his favorite anecdote. Adroit, devoted and familiar, he squeezes its antique situations with enthusiasm and an understanding of talking picture technique.

This time Warner Baxter is the hero, Lupe Velez the svelte squaw who consoles him on the Arizona prairies. A scion of British aristocracy, he has left England after appropriating the disgrace of an embezzlement committed by a cousin and after saying farewell to the cousin's wife, with whom he is in love. When the cousin's wife, finally a widow, goes to Arizona, the picture has a halfway happy ending because the squaw, having contracted the habit of self-sacrifice, kills herself.

The Mad Parade (Paramount). It is an extraordinary fact that although 65% of cinema audiences are women and the majority of men who attend cinemas follow the dictates of their companions, there is only one woman director in Hollywood (Dorothy Arzner) and no important woman executive. The Mad Parade is the first picture with an entirely feminine cast. Men are constantly discussed by the women members (Louise Fazenda, Lilyan Tashman, Irene Rich) of a canteen in the War, but no male actor appears in the picture with the possible exception of a large rat at whom the heroine (Evelyn Brent) throws a hand grenade.

Aside from this sort of novelty, The Mad Parade is neither an unusual nor a particularly interesting picture. The women, drinking brandy out of hot water bottles, cooking doughnuts, scuttling about in relief camps and shell holes and finally marooned in a besieged dugout, seem mainly animated by feelings of curiosity about the affair the heroine is having with an aviator. She is confiding details of this affair to her best friend when the rat appears. The hand grenade misses the rat, kills another one of the girls who was eavesdropping, after which Evelyn Brent volunteers to make a dash for help, gets killed also.

Karamazov (Tobis). German dialog will make this picture half unintelligible to an average U. S. audience. It will not be totally unintelligible because half of the story is told in action which will be clear to anyone.

In telescoping Fyodor Dostoyevsky's prodigious novel to cinema size, the producers naturally selected the moments where the action moved most quickly-- Dmitri Karamazov's farewell to his fiancee, the murder of his father, for which he is later arrested, his affair with Gruschenka which reaches its climax in a debauch at a back-country roadhouse. Before the Manhattan premiere, the U. S. subsidiary of Tobis offered prizes for a 300-word synopsis of The Brothers Karamazov. The melodrama of Karamazov, for a German spectator, is sound and exciting and far more valuable than the apologetic realism of the cinema which might be considered its U. S. counterpart, An American Tragedy. Good shot: Dmitri Karamazov (Fritz Kortner) laughing, when he finds Gruschenka (Anna Sten) at the roadhouse, so loud that everyone else in the place laughs also.

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