The New Pictures

Cavalcade (Fox). On New Year's Eve, 1899, Robert Marryot (Clive Brook) and his wife (Diana Wynyard) are drinking a toast to the new century. Below stairs their butler, Bridges, is finding fault with the parlormaid, Mrs. Bridges.

In the nursery, two small Marryots, Edward and Joe, are feebly pretending to be asleep. A year later, Robert Marryot and Bridges are back from the Boer War. The children, gobbling cake, watch Queen Victoria's funeral from a balcony. By 1908, Bridges and his wife have acquired a pub. Butler Bridges has taken to drinking up the profits and his small daughter Fanny is dancing in the streets. In 1912, Edward Marryot and the daughter of his mother's oldest friend are honeymooning, on the Titanic. In 1914, Joe Marryot is just old enough to get into the War. He spends his leaves with Fanny Bridges (Ursula Jeans), by this time grown up into a cabaret entertainer. He gets killed just before the Armistice. On New Year's Eve, 1932, Sir Robert and Lady Marryot have the champagne brought up for another New Year's toast. Lady Marryot proposes it--"that this England, which we love so much, will some day find dignity, greatness and peace again. . . ."

If you have seen the ten best pictures of 1932 (see above), you would do well to see Cavalcade which is almost certain to be near the top of the list for 1933. It is an adaptation of a stage production by Noel Coward which played in London all last winter--an adaptation so ambitiously conceived and brilliantly executed that it is hard to imagine how the play could have been more than a preliminary outline. Cavalcade, which is essentially the history of one English family, becomes, by implication, a history, almost a definition, of England. Against its spacious background, the subsidiary stories in Cavalcade have a sharp and eloquent perspective which Director Frank Lloyd emphasized by using, not the fulsome rhetoric with which the cinema usually attempts the epic manner, but a sort of cinematic shorthand. The significance to England of Queen Victoria's death becomes apparent from an incident in the Marryots' kitchen; a shot of a life-preserver--lettered S. S. Titanic--ends, with an abrupt full-stop, the story of Edward Marryot and his bride. Of an adroit British cast which includes Herbert Mundin, Beryl Mercer, John Warburton, Frank Lawton and four child actors, Diana Wynyard gives the most noteworthy characterization.

Men and Jobs (Amkino) differs from the run of Russian pictures in the light touch with which its director, Alexander Macharet, has embellished his small chronicle of earnest endeavor by the foreman of a construction gang. This foreman (Nicholas Okhlopkov) is chipper about his methods and proud of his efficiency until a U. S. engineer arrives to work in the same project--the building of a power dam which represents the one opened at Dnieprostroy last autumn. A rivalry arises between the two men in which the Russian, at first thoroughly worsted, struggles to catch up. His efforts, less heroic than amusing, in one sequence produce the kind of comic suspense on which early Harold Lloyd pictures were constructed. The mechanic in charge of a steam crane gets drunk. The Russian foreman orders him out of the cab and climbs in himself. With very little knowledge of how the contraption will react, he begins to pull its levers, manages, by the skin of his teeth, to avoid dropping several tons of cement on his underlings. Men and Jobs is not. essentially, entertainment, but it is a striking and intelligent advertisement for the Five-Year Plan. Good shot: the Russian foreman making a speech in which he tries to explain how, after all, he and his workmen have succeeded in beating their competitor--because of their "enthusiasm."

Frisco Jenny (Warner) is a slightly revised version of two earlier Ruth Chatterton pictures--Madame X, in which she was a Parisian prostitute with a small son, and Once a Lady, in which she was a Parisian prostitute with a small daughter. In Frisco Jenny, Ruth Chatterton lives in California and acts as a procuress--first to provide bread and mittens for her small illegitimate whippersnapper; then, from force of habit. While branching out with a profitable bootlegging business, Frisco Jenny keeps a scrapbook of her son's doings. When this scrapbook reveals that he is running for district attorney of San Francisco at the age of 25, audiences can foresee what will follow: a courtroom scene in which Jenny is denounced by her son (Donald Cook), condemned to be hanged.

Stories of this type hold expansive possibilities for romantic tragediennes. Ruth Chatterton makes the most of them, particularly throughout the carefully built-up climax sequence at San Quentin prison, in which she bravely refrains from telling the district attorney the secret that might save her. Typical shot: Frisco Jenny watching the 1926 Stanford v. California football game in which her son plays for Stanford.

The Mummy (Universal). Boris Karloff, like the late Lon Chancy whose niche in the cinema he is trying hard to inherit, keeps his pressagent busy estimating the amount of time he expends in putting on makeup. For The Mummy, Karloff's preparations took eight hours. He dampened his face, covered it with strips of cotton, applied collodion and spirit gum, pinned his ears back, covered his head with clay, painted himself with 22 kinds of greasepaint, then wound himself up like a top in bandages which had been rotted in acid and roasted. It is a pity that these energetic preliminaries preceded a horror picture which contains only one genuinely hair-raising moment--when the words of a charm are accidentally spoken by a young archeologist and the 3,700-year-old corpse of an Egyptian priest comes to life in its tomb.

Thereafter The Mummy is a thoroughly unreasonable hocus-pocus in which it develops that the reanimated mummy is enamored of the archeologist's fiancee (Zita Johann) who, in a previous incarnation, was an Egyptian priestess. To consummate his romance, the mummy tries to kill the archeologist's fiancee, but goes about it too deliberately to be successful. Typical shot: Karloff and Johann seated beside a tubful of hot water in the steam of which they discern scenes from their life in 1767 B. C.

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