The New Pictures

The Hatchet Man (First National). So convincingly did Edward G. Robinson perform in Little Caesar and Smart Money that he, rather than Alphonse Capone or the late John ("Legs") Diamond, has become the prototype of the U. S. gangster. When cinemaddicts read of the doings in the underworld, they form an immediate picture of Edward G. Robinson operating a machine gun in Chicago, a distillery in Manhattan or a poker game in a Florida casino. Actually, however, the countenance of Edward G. Robinson is less wicked than Mongolian. Shrewdly cast in this old (David Belasco-Achmed Abdullah) melodrama of San Francisco's Chinatown, he needs no make-up to assure you that he is the heathen executioner of the Lem Sing Tong.

The oriental face of Edward G. Robinson contains all the most convincing features of the entertainment. He is forced, by the rules of his tong, to bury his hatchet in the neck of his best friend who, aware that no personal enmity is involved, wills his daughter to his murderer. Complications occur when the daughter (Loretta Young, with braces for her eyes) grows up. She marries the hatchetman but falls in love with a worthless Oriental who takes her to China and sells her into slavery. Robinson with his axe retrieves her. The narrative, sensational and gory, unlikely and over deliberate, resembles a Sunday feature story in a cheap newssheet. Typical shot: an old Tongster (Dudley Digges) registering Chinese imperturbability by blinking when Robinson asks him a question.

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