The New Pictures

Gabriel Over the White House

(Cosmopolitan). Judson Hammond (Walter Huston) when elected President of the U. S. is a free & easy party politician, addicted to undignified jollities and speeding in his automobile. When he blows out a tire at 98 m.p.h., he gets concussion of the brain. During his convalescence there are peculiar sounds of music in the sickroom; the curtains shake in what might have been a breeze. When President Hammond recovers, he is a changed man. His female secretary (Karen Motley) tells his male secretary (Franchot Tone) that she thinks the Angel Gabriel may be hovering about the White House.

On his feet again, President Hammond starts to make things hum. He demands and gets the resignation of his Secretary of State. He addresses an army of unemployed, enlists them in a civilian workers corps. He gets rid of all his Cabinet when they plot against him. When there is a motion in Congress to impeach him, he adjourns Congress, makes himself dictator. Molested by a tycoon gangster, he places his secretary at the head of a corps of Federal police in armored cars. They bombard the gangster's distillery, deliver its occupants to a firing squad. Throughout the picture the invisible presence of the Angel Gabriel is felt no more strongly than that of William Randolph Hearst whose cinema company made the film. President Hammond holds a debt parley on a yacht, gives visiting diplomats a display of U. S. navy planes sinking an obsolete warship. Then he proposes that Europe pay its debts in full on pain of being annihilated by a U. S. Navy built beyond treaty limits. All this ends in a covenant of total and apparently worldwide disarmament. As President Hammond slowly scratches his name at the bottom of the covenant, the Angel Gabriel deserts him. He lives just long enough to be carried into a bedroom for a few heroic last words.

Spectacles which appeal primarily to patriotism--an emotion lately revived by the cinema--need to be timely, spectacular and sentimental. Because Gabriel Over the White House is all three, it is likely to be one of the most talked-of pictures of the year. By a stroke of good luck for the producers, several measures like those instituted by President Hammond have already been effected by President Roosevelt. The cinema omits several episodes dealing with such abstruse matters as gold and banking included in the book which a British brigadier general named Thomas F. Tweed wrote anonymously last February (TIME, Feb. 13). Instead of showing the President returned to normal and ready to repudiate his good deeds at the end, the picture makes him a durably heroic if somewhat implausible personage, handling the affairs of nations as though they were rabbits in a hat. Instead of dating the story emphatically in the future by showing passenger flights, televisioned speeches and the aftermath of a war between Japan and the U. S., Britain and France, the picture tries to be as contemporaneous and local as possible, makes an army of unemployed resemble last summer's B. E. F. Typical shots: The President forbidding his Secretary of War to mobilize against the army of unemployed; advising his Cabinet to read the Constitution; insisting on having microphones on the table at a diplomatic conference; signing the Washington Covenant with a feather pen that drops out of his hand as he finishes the last letter.

Walter Huston, who got practice for his role by playing Presidents Grant and Lincoln in earlier cinemas, tries a little too hard to look like a Hearst cartoonist's idea of a benevolent dictator, but he sounds impressive. A little disappointing is the performance of Franchot Tone--the ablest young stage actor who migrated to Hollywood from Broadway last year--in a role which requires him to supply simultaneously romantic interest and the austerity proper to his station.

The Keyhole (Warner) concerns a romance that springs up between a private detective (George Brent) and the girl (Kay Francis) whom he follows from

Manhattan to Cuba as her husband's spy. Such a romance could obviously entail comedy of one sort or another. It is presented instead in a sentimental mood which ill befits the confusion between Brent's romantic interest in the heroine and his thoroughly ungallant professional curiosity. What makes The Keyhole acceptable entertainment is the charm of Kay Francis' acting, good settings by Anton Grot and a few amusing sequences in which Allen Jenkins, as a brash and dipsomaniac assistant detective, pursues a mercenary blonde (Glenda Farrell) under the delusion that she is an heiress.

M (Nerofilm). A little German girl dawdling home from school is spoken to by a pudgy, rubber-faced young man; he admires the ball she is bouncing and, whistling a snatch from Peer Gynt in a strange, convulsive way, buys her a funny balloon. Presently you see the ball rolling out of a clump of bushes, the balloon, caught in telegraph wires, bobbing crazily in the wind.

This is the way Director Fritz Lang starts a picture which makes a paranoiac with a penchant for killing small girls one of the most unforgettable cinema villains of the year. After a look at the murderer, you are shown the effect which a series of his crimes has had upon the city where he lives. Tipplers in beer gardens suspect each other of being monsters. An elderly gentleman who tells an urchin what time it is is nearly mobbed. The police make a dragnet around the town, question hundreds of suspects, arrive at no conclusions. Finally the outlaws of the town--pickpockets, forgers, cardsharps, safe-blowers, burglars, beggars, all of them under closer scrutiny than usual because of the child murders--form a furtive posse. The next time you see the murderer he is staring into a cutlery shop window. There, framed in knives, he sees reflected the figure of a little girl behind him. He turns around and starts toward her, whistling the tune that is connected in his sick mind with what he wants to do.

The tune is his undoing. When he goes again to buy a funny balloon, the peddler who sells it to him recognizes his whistle, signals a confrere. The confrere bumps into the villain, slaps on his back a chalk M to identify him. The thieves and beggars follow him, corner him in the storeroom of an office building. They take him off to face their kangaroo court in the cellar of a deserted brewery. His psychopathic defense--"You are criminals because you want to be! I am one because I cannot help it!"--is about to fail when the police arrive. You do not see whether Society kills or tries to cure him.

Brilliant, morbid and exciting, M is based on the Duesseldorf child murders of 1929 (the perpetrator of which, Butcher Kuerten, was executed). It was written, like most of Director Lang's productions, by his wife. Thea von Harbou. It is all in German, with fairly adequate English subtitles superimposed. Peter Lorre distinguishes himself in a magnificent cast by his haunting performance as the murderer. Good shot: the pudgy young man after seeing himself described as a maniac, peering into a mirror and stretching his mouth to see if he looks crazy.

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