The New Pictures

In Mr. Robinson Crusoe (United Artists) bouncing Douglas Fairbanks Sr. cheerfully burlesques Daniel Defoe's old story. He does it by his familiar formula of expansio ad absurdum, inflating his original idea into incredible superlatives. Fairbanks is on his way to Sumatra to shoot tigers when his schooner yacht passes close to a tropic island and he bets his friend (William Farnum) that he is competent to mold jungle into civilization with only bare hands and one toothbrush. The friend takes the bet; Fairbanks jumps overboard; his dog follows; Fairbanks throws back the toothbrush. Audiences chuckle as he staggers out of the surf with his alert, parody Boy Scout expression, ready for any emergency Scenarist Tom Geraghty may devise. Having landed June i, by June 24 he has made saws, jugs, hammocks, hatchet, carpenter's plane, outhouse with scroll-sawed star & crescent, pickaxe, baskets, architect's plans; has taught a parrot to say "O.K.," his dog to be civil to a monkey that vaguely resembles Fairbanks. Soon afterward he has dug traps, caught a goat, made the he-goat run a treadmill to churn the she-goat's milk, trained a turtle to follow food dangled by a stick in a circle, thereby lifting water from a well to run down a chute, over a fire and out of a faucet marked "Hot." He lives in a "penthouse," an impressive four-room house on a platform that must have taken the United Artists carpenter crew months to make (not to speak of the months they must have spent making hollowed wooden dishes, sharpened shell knives and scissors, woven blankets and tapestries, basket work). He has an elaborate machine to throw a fishnet far out to sea, a trolley to carry him down the mountainside. From a savage whom he tries to make his Man Friday, who escapes after Fairbanks has shown him the white man's leg-scissor hold, toehold, and hammerlock, he obtains zinc and copper (cheerfully left unexplained) and two radio tubes the savage With these and several score handmade batteries, he makes a radio set, listens happily to news of traffic deaths, business suicides, cosmetics and alimony.

The plot enters in the person of a beauteous native girl (Maria Alba) who has run away from marriage on a nearby island. She likes Fairbanks, gets into bed with him. He extricates himself, calls her "cute." Meanwhile Fairbanks' returning friends stop at the nearby island that Maria Alba has left, hire the natives to fake a capture and the beginning of a stake-burning, to be interrupted by the friends. The natives come, find the escaped girl, carry out the stake-burning in earnest. But as Fairbanks' homemade shorts get hot, the monkey turns on the radio, the savages flee, the girl rescues Fairbanks. Both escape to the yacht. In Manhattan Fairbanks makes the girl eligible for marriage by making her a famed Broadway dancer, like Reri whom the late Film Director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau discovered, who danced in the late Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies, is now in vaudeville.

Douglas Fairbanks, 49, leaps and handstands less in Mr. Robinson Crusoe than in his famed earlier pictures, The Mark of Zorro, Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Thief of Bagdad, Black Pirate, Iron Mask.

Blonde Venus (Paramount) presents a new excuse for Marlene Dietrich to play a bad woman. Excuse: sick husband. The picture graphs her degeneration. Excuse: mother-love. Toward the end, having left husband & child behind, she rises fast, her motto being "Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone." She completes the cycle in the arms of husband & child.

Director Josef von Sternberg wrote the story, quit Paramount and took Miss Dietrich with him when the story was rewritten, later returned to direct her in it. Von Sternberg, who has repeatedly denied being born Joe Stern in Brooklyn, opens with a sylvan swimming scene in Germany's Black Forest (300 miles from Berlin) where U. S. hikers surprise Berlin actresses off for the afternoon. One hiker (Herbert Marshall) marries Marlene Dietrich, takes her to the U. S. They have a child. Marshall contracts radium poisoning in his scientific research. To send him to a Dresden doctor, Marlene returns to cabaret work, lets a lisping politician (Gary Grant) keep her. The husband, cured and returned, threatens to take Marlene's child away. She is hounded down the scale until she gives up the child, flops in & out of a 15-c- flophouse, suddenly reappears as a toasted but disillusioned Paris diseuse. At this point her bony, impassive face, deep, hoarse voice, crazy- reckless look and swagger are unpleasant but impressive. Hardly the madonna type, she comes home for the ultimate pleasure of holding her child for a moment, decides to stay as her child's music box tinkles out the case for commonplace happiness. Good shot: a fake cabaret gorilla rocking formidably from side to side, pulling off one paw to expose a slender white hand (Dietrich's).

Tiger Shark (Warner Bros.) is a bloody cinema of tuna fishing in trawlers out of Southern California's San Diego. Edward G. Robinson is a Portuguese captain who saves Richard Arlen from the sharks, loses a hand to them, is married by Zita Johann for gratitude, not for love. When he finds that Arlen, his best friend, is in love with his wife, he bashes him with his hooked stump and throws him to the sharks, himself falls to them and dies of the attentions of a shark that crawls up his back as he is pulled back into the boat.

Noteworthy is the tuna fishing detail: the lookout man, the leaping school of tuna in the distance, the bait-thrower, the lashing together of double lines with two poles for the big tuna, the wild scenes with three fish continuously in the air, the sharks' sinister grey shadows beneath the surface. The tuna are the composite hero throughout, the sharks the composite villain. The sharks "settle everything," tumble drowning fishermen, end love triangles, horrify audiences. Robinson writhes and mouths his lines in an effective, fat facsimile of Lionel Barrymore's acting. Zita Johann, beauteous Austrian-born importation from Manhattan, is a convincing emotionalist, serious and big-eyed.

Rain (United Artists), based on Somerset Maugham's story and more famed play, made memorable by the late Actress Jeanne Eagels, tries to justify the ways of Heroine Sadie Thompson to Man. Director Lewis Milestone has made semi-respectable, unexciting, the old sure-fire melodrama. Of the hot Pacific island where the rain monotonously rains and the characters get crescendo jitters, Milestone gets no illusion. The characters are not damp to the skin. Their clothes do not stick clammily to their flanks. The food does not spoil. Green mold does not sprout on everything. The heat is not heat at all. Faces are unsweated. Appetites are healthv. The weather does not. as in the play, exhaust the characters of energy, ravel out their nerves. Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford) is no longer a harlot. She is a dull girl with an unfortunate past. Joan Crawford works hard but looks too wholesome and collegiate to suit the part. The basic trouble really is that Rain is presented as a classic, not as the 10-20-30 melodrama of popping sex and fanaticism that Maugham wrote. Typical shot: a closeup of the name Golden Gate on the side of a ship, spelled out letter by letter, three times in succession, possibly to create suspense.

A Successful Calamity (Warner Bros.), cinematized for George Arliss, is neatly based on Clare Kummer's demoded "situation'' play of misunderstandings, tricks, plots and counterplots. George Arliss is a famed Wall Street broker, important enough to be congratulated by the President of the U. S. (shown anonymously from behind). Lonely for his wife (Mary Astor), son and daughter, he learns from his butler (Grant Mitchell) that ''the poor don't get to go much." He interrupts his family's frivolings with polo and pianists by pretending that he is ruined. They stay home with him and have a lovely time. The deception works overtime and earns George Arliss another million dollars behind his back. Pressure ennobles everybody; the story shows them all good enough to be poor though in fact richer than ever. George Arliss, looking like a wise, kind turtle, is quiet and expert as the kind of millionaire everybody would like to be. Typical shot: loyal Butler Mitchell matter-of-factly giving Arliss his life savings to carry him through the crisis, making audiences sniffle.

Maedchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan), last spring's most discussed European cinema, was rejected by the New York State Board of Censors on the ground that it too intimately explored female adolescence. U. S. sponsors finally convinced the censors it was a story of new Germany v. old Germany. They added English subtitles and presented it.

In pre-War Potsdam the state school for officers' daughters receives sensitive, 14-year-old Manuela von Meinhardis (Hertha Thiele). The principal (Emilia Onda) tries to turn out steel women to match Prussia's iron men by bundling the little girls in heavy uniforms, marching them in columns up & down long winding stairs, starving, shadowing, suppressing them. At night they weep for loneliness; they exploit any teacher's kindness into a schoolgirl "crush"; on a rare party they go half-mad with sudden unrestraint. Manuela, after a play in which she has starred, drinks several glasses of the school punch, staggers to the platform and announces that she loves a particular teacher, that the Fraulein (Dorothea Wieck) has given her a chemise. Of this the principal makes such a scandal that the child goes to kill herself by jumping from the top of the staircase well. The other children drag her back in time. The final scene, in which the overwrought children gather around the young Fraulein, is made the symbol of the harsh old principal's spiritual defeat, the prediction of old Germanv's death.

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