The New Pictures

The Sign of the Cross (Paramount). Cecil Blount De Mille directed his first cinema, The Squaw Man, 19 years ago. Since then he has directed 56 more. A director of the old school, he has retained his taste for grandiloquent language, pretentious sets, casts of 1,000 or more. This picture, a vast conglomeration about the Emperor Nero, Christian martyrs, Roman palaces, catacombs, lions yapping in the Circus, is a religious spectacle, like The King of Kings and The Ten Commandments, of the type De Mille likes best. Before starting it he said he had been waiting for ten years for the cinema to become a vehicle adequate for what he had in mind. Choosing Elissa Landi for the role of heroine, he said: ". . . She combines mysticism and sex with the pure and wholesome. There is the depth of the ages in her eyes, today in her body and tomorrow in her spirit." As is his custom, Director De Mille took his scenarists on a yachting party to prepare the script; used a megaphone, now almost obsolete in Hollywood, to harangue his extras whom he gets not from the studio casting office but from a list of his own.

As usual, Director De Mille explained to his extras that they were not merely supernumeraries, they were actors. As usual, they overacted, "mugged" their meagre parts.

From a company making a picture for him, Director De Mille demands strict attention during his frequent harangues. During the course of one such address while filming his latest piece, he sternly asked one female extra what she was whispering about. She said she was wondering when he would stop talking so she could get to lunch. Thereupon he took her to lunch.

The story of The Sign of the Cross, included in the repertory of every stock company in England since it was first played in 1895, is obvious devotional melodrama. Nero (Charles Laughton) orders his lieutenant, Marcus Superbus (Fredric March), to clear Rome of Christians. While doing so, Marcus falls in love with a Christian girl named Mercia (Elissa Landi). This makes the vicious Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert) jealous. Marcus Superbus tries to persuade Mercia to become a pagan. He fails. Nero wants to forgive her for being a Christian but Poppaea, to save Marcus from what she considers a misalliance, refuses to allow it. Mercia goes to the lions first. Marcus follows her--not, as in the original story, because he has been converted, but for reasons of gallantry, which Director De Mille considered more affecting. As rewritten by Paramount's Scenarists Sidney Birchman and Waldemar Young, The Sign of the Cross is a Roman holiday of semi-civilized sentiment which is likely to redeem the $600,000 it cost, validate Director De Mille's dictum that no religious cinema has ever failed. Typical shot: Christians in a dungeon, waiting to be martyred, with a young and handsome female Christian under a beam of light in the centre.

Call Her Savage (Fox) is a blatant and tasteless libel on the Amerind, notable only because its heroine is impersonated by Clara Bow, who retired from the cinema in 1931 after winning a suit against her secretary, Daisy De Boe. When, after retiring to a Nevada ranch and marrying Actor Rex Bell, Cinemactress Bow announced last summer that she would resume acting, producers were dubious. They felt that Miss De Boe's revelations about Miss Bow's private affairs might have injured her popularity. Having decided to take a chance, Fox did more. It chose as a vehicle for Cinemactress Bow a story as crude as possible. Author Tiffany Thayer's Call Her Savage. As the heroine of this opus, Miss Bow is called upon to show the sexual glamour for which she is celebrated by beating a rattlesnake to death with a horsewhip, flaying a half-breed Indian, marrying a libertine (Monroe Owsley) and knocking him unconscious, blacking the eye of her husband's mistress (Thelma Todd), practicing prostitution, boxing the ears of her second fiance (Anthony Jewitt) and punching a horse in the stomach. The only explanation for her behavior lies in the fact that she is not, as she supposes, the daughter of a Texas railroad millionaire (Willard Robertson) but the bastard offspring of his wife (Estelle Taylor) and a yodeling Indian chief named Ronasa.

Monroe Owsley, who has been a cinema cad so often that his last name sounds like a pun, tries hard to be an oily villain but his part, like everything else in the story, is cheaply invented and implausible. The only redeeming feature of Call Her Savage is Miss Bow's performance. Looking slightly more blowzy than she did in the days when she played flapper parts in silent cinema, she shows with enthusiastic violence and a flat, tough Brooklyn accent what such flappers can turn out to be when they grow up. Typical shot: Nasa (Clara Bow), insulted in a cafe, hurling a plate with one hand and striking a waiter with the other. Confessed Actress Bow when she arrived in Manhattan last week: "I'm getting older, and hot-cha doesn't pay."

The Half Naked Truth (RKO). Lee

Tracy: "A row of farmers is a circus man's rosary. . . . Never give a sucker an even break, 'cause it's dog eat dog all along the line. . . . For every kid that's born with a dollar there's twins born on the other side of the street aiming to take it away from him. ... So the only way to make a ten strike is to strike up the band. . . . Anyway, what the heck, it's a lot of fun.

Lupe Velez: "Ha! So you are jealous of me!"

This will give some idea of the conversation in The Half Naked Truth. It is romance between a circus spieler (Tracy) and a cooch dancer (Velez) made funny by the way the dialog, by Bartlett Cormack and Corey Ford, and Gregory La Cava's direction favor the eccentricities of Tracy and Velez. Vaguely derived from incidents in the life of famed Publicist Harry Reichenbach, the story rambles about in the noisy manner of such carnival anecdotes. The spieler blackmails a producer (Frank Morgan), puts a lion in the cooch dancer's hotel room. Ballyhooed into being a musical comedy star, she goes back to cooch dancing when the spieler publicizes another carnival wench in connection with a nudist colony. Possibly because preview audiences were so enthusiastic about The Half Naked Truth, RKO last fortnight ceased bickering with Cinemactor Tracy about his salary, which was withheld when he frequently failed to appear on the set. Terms of the agreement: $1,750, half of the salary due Cinemactor Tracy to be paid immediately, half when he has made his next picture for RKO.

Prosperity (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). If you took any comic strip joke about a mother-in-law, multiplied it by two, added a bank failure, four platitudes about the silver lining, and a vaudeville fox terrier you would have all the ingredients of Prosperity except the one which makes it human and amusing. This ingredient is Marie Dressier, who always impersonates grunting, sympathetic, noisy, witty, violent, immensely courageous old ladies but somehow manages to do it with enough vitality to make them seem alive. This time she is Maggie Warren, a grizzled widow who runs her husband's bank until the day her son gets married, when she turns over the reins to him. His mother-in-law is a Mrs. Praskins (Polly Moran) who is all that Maggie Warren is not. Lizzie Praskins has the face, manners and characteristics of a rat and she starts a run on the Warren bank by squeaking for her money out of a desire to be troublesome. The run is disastrous because young John Warren has been so stupid as to lend the bank's best bonds to parties who do not wish to give them back. All this reduces Maggie Warren to noble penury. She sells her house and furnishings, goes with her dog, Mutt, to board at Mrs. Praskins'. W7hen humiliated into leaving she makes the gesture of committing suicide so that her life insurance will enable the bank to reopen. Wobbling her jaw, protruding her underlip and narrowing her eyes, Marie Dressier somehow makes the crude fable (written by Sylvia Thalberg, sister of MGM's Production Chief Irving Thalberg) laughable and interesting. Most vulgar shot: Maggie Warren finding out that the bottle from which she has been gulping what she thought was poison, contained something else.

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