The New Pictures

A Woman Commands (RKO-Pathe). Apollonia Chalupez (Pola Negri) has a warm soft voice and an accent which, although she is a Polish gypsy, makes her sound almost exactly like Greta Garbo. This curious little picture--a combination of comedy, romance, mid-European melodramatics, court intrigue and fictionized history--does not suit her so well as the vampire parts she used to play in silent films but it has a few amusing sequences. Pola Negri, as a celebrated lady of the stage, is enamored of a captain in the Royal Guards (Basil Rathbone). She finds herself closeted with the King who, as played by Roland Young, is an elegantly frowzy little monarch with no regal pretensions beyond that of giggling quietly at his own wisecracks. Presently, by royal command. Miss Negri is married to the King while her guardsman is jailed for failing to salute her. The King's marriage causes his subjects to denounce him as a buffoon, but they do not become really incensed until the christening of the heir to the throne, a ceremony for which the Prime Minister tries to supply the proper air of spontaneous festivity by hiring all the professional mourners in the city to cheer as the King goes by. At this point, the picture suddenly descends to sorry melodrama. The jolly little king is murdered by his soldiers and Miss Negri, called upon to admit that her son is illegitimate, barely escapes with her life.

Small, lackadaisical Roland Young emigrated from London 20 years ago. achieved his greatest stage success in Rollo's Wild Oat, a play written by his mother-in-law, Clare Kummer. In the cinema, Young is usually a chipper menace, a sleek eccentric drunkard, or a patrician foil for some more homespun leading man. In private life, he is a collector of penguins in books, pictures and statuary, which he maintains in the penguin room of his Hollywood home. Of penguins he says: "I like them because they are different. ... I am going to spend lots of time studying penguins." In The Queen's Husband instead of scribbling the despatches called for by his role, Young amused himself by writing verse. The printable ones were included in a book called Not for Children. Sample:

And here's the happy bounding flea--

You cannot tell the he from she.

The sexes look alike, you see

But she can tell and so can he. . . .

High Pressure (Warner). Since the departure of gang pictures, the cinema has developed half a dozen minor trends to take their place. One, already on the wane, was for "kid pictures." like Skippy, Sooky, Huckleberry Finn. Another was for "one location" stories, like Transatlantic, Union Depot, the forthcoming Hotel Continental and Grand Hotel. A third, closest to the technique of gang pictures, was a series of surveys of exciting occupations, such as taxi-driving, gambling, swindling and reporting.

High Pressure belongs more or less to this last category, except that in its attitude toward the industry of stock promotion it is slightly less informative than farcical. Turkish baths restore William Powell, discovered drunk in a ginmill, to a condition in which he is fit to undertake the organization of a campaign to sell stock in a company for making rubber out of sewage. Vastly successful at this enterprise, he is presently discomforted to learn that the inventor, upon whose formulas the company's production plans depend, has disappeared. He is even more discomforted when the inventor reappears and proves himself to be a lunatic. While manipulating his concern, Powell is harassed by the incompetence of his staff, a fat Hebrew whom he names Col. Ginsberg (George Sidney) and a suave dummy president equipped with frock coat and toupe (Guy Kibbee), and by the justified suspicions of an attractive brunette (Evelyn Brent), whom he is prepared to marry at the end of the picture. High Pressure, well directed by Mervyn LeRoy, is rapid, trivial, dextrous and absurd. Good shot: Powell, rewarded with $100,000 for his synthetic rubber company, planning to capitalize a concern for making wooden airplanes.

Road to Life (Mejrabpom), first sound picture produced in Russia where only eleven theatres have apparatus for this type of cinema, is frankly propaganda. It exhibits, with great self-satisfaction, Soviet methods of dealing with the problem of the wolfish ragamuffins who infested Moscow after the War. Corralled by the police, the wild boys are set to work in a juvenile Commune, superintended by a tactful and vigorous social worker (Nikolai Batalov). From time to time they are obstreperous but gradually they become addicted to honesty and industry. The star pupil of what Batalov calls the "Children's Commune" is a stubby youth named Mustapha (Tzyvan Kyrla), with the figure of a baboon, the face of a gargoyle and the courage of a juvenile Lenin. Smartest of pickpockets when he roved the Moscow streets, Mustapha helps lick his cronies into social shape and is pleased with plans to build 50 mi. of railroad so that the Children's Collective can import raw material to provide work for idle hands. A model of regeneration, his great moment arrives when Fomka Zhigan, onetime Fagin of the wild boys, establishes a brothel near the Children's Collective. Aided by his comrades, Mustapha demolishes the place much as Carrie Nation used to demolish saloons, is later killed for doing so by Zhigan. Pictorially brilliant, like many another Russian film, Road to Life is tentative rather than original in its use of sound. English captions by Michael Gold make it intelligible for U. S. audiences and its subject, its earnest enthusiasm, make it exciting.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Paramount). The overtones, the air of saying less than he means which Philip Barry puts into his serious plays, are somehow lacking in the cinematic version of Tomorrow and Tomorrow. This is a matter of mood rather than incident, for the story remains unchanged. An unhappy wife, eager to have children and bored with her sterile husband's sporting preoccupations, gets a solution of sorts by being more than a hostess to a celebrated psychiatrist who visits their town. Eight years later, when his child is ill, the psychiatrist comes back to cure him, then suggests to the wife that they leave together. She, sensing the disaster which this would entail, prefers the personal catastrophe of watching his departure from the window, with her husband who still thinks the doctor's child is his own. The play lacks surface too much to be an ideal vehicle for the cinema in general or for Ruth Chatterton in particular. Her performance, like that of Paul Lukas, as the doctor, and the late Robert Ames, as the husband, has a studied competence which leaves Tomorrow and Tomorrow the cold outline of a spurious dilemma instead of a tragedy in heroic compromise.

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