The New Pictures

Trouble in Paradise (Paramount) is a triumph of direction and decor which could have been accomplished only by that scowling, heavy-jowled Teuton who is Paramount's chief contribution to the civilized cinema, Ernst Lubitsch. As a rule, Director Lubitsch likes to run songs through his pictures, to accent moods and italicize bon mots. This time the songs are inaudible but they are somehow implied in the flavor of the picture--like the olive which can be tasted in a good Martini cocktail even when it is not there.

Paramount invariably gives Director Lubitsch expert casts and this time he had Herbert Marshall for the role of a romantic crook, Miriam Hopkins for the crook's accomplice and inamorata, and Kay Francis for the patrician lady they set out to rob. Miss Francis obligingly makes Herbert Marshall her secretary and then falls in love with him.

Though Hollywood's leading couturiers have long been successful not in copying fashions but in setting them, it is only recently that the cinema has started to revolutionize the art of interior decoration. Beyond its direction and cast, Trouble in Paradise is fortunate in its sets, by Hans Dreier. Furniture manufacturers would do well to examine closely a collection of clocks which mark, with morbidly graceful hands and pleasant tinkles, a space of several hours in which Miss Francis and Mr. Marshall are up to no good. Also, Miss Francis' bed, whose contours are inviting but polite.

Evenings for Sale (Paramount) is a pleasant little program picture which would probably be an unpleasant little program picture but for the presence in it of Herbert Marshall and Sari Maritza. Marshall is Count von Degenthal who, in the failing of his family's fortunes, has been forced to capitalize his good manners in the ignoble profession of gigolo. Maritza is the pretty daughter of a wealthy businessman who admires the count but despises his calling. When a fat U. S. widow (Mary Boland) buys the von Degenthal castle at an auction and plans to modernize it into an apartment hotel with the count for manager and his valet (Charles Ruggles) for maitre d'hotel, the inevitable alliance between Marshall and Maritza develops without further impediment. Typical shot: Maritza peeping out behind a curtain while Marshall superciliously accepts a stogie from her father.

If, as now seems extremely probable, Herbert Marshall becomes a genuine U. S. cinema star, with a high box office rating and a salary to match, it will be a most extraordinary turn of events. His appeal is essentially neither sentimental nor simian. In an era when Hollywood's other successful matinee idols either beat their women or sing to them, he personifies grace, intelligence, poise, wit. Son of a British actor, Herbert Marshall fitted himself, at St. Mary's College, to be an articled clerk. He did so poorly at it that he was forced to go on the stage. Just before the War he played with Cyril Maude in Grumpy. Herbert Marshall has divided his time between the stages of London and Manhattan, where he has been seen in These Charming People, The High Road, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and last season, with his wife Edna Best, in There's Always Juliet. Edna Best was in Hollywood last year under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; she left to join her husband who was then in no special demand by the cinema. The situations of Edna Best and Herbert Marshall are now reversed. Last month he left Hollywood, whither he will soon return, to join his wife in the London cast of Another Language.

Kameradschaft (Nero). "Ethical, not aesthetic values make up the value of this film." If this statement, by George Vil-helm Pabst who directed it, were true, Kameradschaft would of course be a negligible sermon, unfit to be observed. It is on the contrary a powerful and convincing picture of which the ethical values are important because, in his treatment of a coal-mine disaster on the Franco-German border, Director Pabst has implied them so artfully.

The incident on which Kameradschaft is based occurred at Courrieres, Alsace-Lorraine, in 1906. When part of a mine on the French side of the border blew up. German miners from the other side came over to help rescue the imprisoned miners. International-minded Director Pabst moved the disaster up to 1919, showed the reminiscent rancor of the War in an exclamation by the sweetheart of an imprisoned French miner when she hears that a rescue party is coming over from the German side. She says: "Les Alle-magnes--c'est impossible!" The Germans pile out of trucks, go down the shaft with gas masks. A French miner, muddled by fear and dazed by gas, when he sees someone crawling toward him in a mask mistakes his rescuer for a German soldier. Director Pabst never stops emphasizing his theme--that for miners, gas and war, not each other, are common enemies-- but he does it with a photographic vigor that makes Kameradschaft resemble a brilliant newsreel much more than a dramatized tract. The picture has been successful abroad, where it was released last winter. With English subtitles to translate its sparse dialogue it is likely to enjoy a more limited success in the U. S.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Warner). When he gets back from the War, Sergeant James Allen (Paul Muni) is too ambitious to go back to his old job in a shoe factory. He wants to be a construction engineer and sets out to look for a job. His luck is bad. One night he finds himself in a lunchroom with a tramp who points a gun at the proprietor and orders Allen to open the cash register. When police arrive, they kill the tramp and hold Allen for robbery. He is sentenced to ten years at hard labor.

The first time he escapes, Allen hides in a river, sucking air through a reed, while bloodhounds yap along the bank. He goes to Chicago, resumes his career as an engineer and is in a fair way to succeed at it when a woman (Glenda Farrell), who has used her knowledge of his past to force him to marry her, betrays him to the authorities. Back in the chain gang, Allen presently finds another chance to make a getaway. He steals a truck and blows up a bridge to foil the pursuit. The picture ends before he is recaptured for the second time.

I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang is presented not as melodrama but as a dark and monstrous case history, an angry document indicting U. S. jurisprudence, penal technique in the State of Georgia and the bludgeonings of chance. It is undoubtedly the most embittered cinema ever made in the U. S. and also one of the most effective, largely due to a savage and adroit performance by Paul Muni. The picture was derived from a book published last year and called, more specifically. I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang. While the cinema opened simultaneously in 212 cities last week, Warner publicists did not permit the public to forget that the author of this bald autobiographical narrative. Robert E. Burns, was hiding in Manhattan, trying to interest Lawyer Clarence Darrow in his dismal case.

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