The New Pictures

This Is America. In the past five years there have been released in the U. S. more than a dozen travelog and animal films like Goona-Goona, Rango, Douglas Fairbanks' Around the World in 80 Minutes, through all of which ran a story's thread. From Russia have come nonfictional propaganda pictures (Turksib, Ten Days That Shook the World). The War Department and private producers have shown War films (Powder River, The Big Drive), and before that Emanuel Cohen of Pathe News exhibited a three-reeler called Flashes of the Past. Such was the meagre history of the non-fiction film field until last week, when Frederick Ullman Jr., of Pathe and Writer Gilbert Seldes (The Seven Lively Arts) showed This Is America to an enthusiastic audience in Manhattan. This Is America is calculated to help satisfy the public appetite for recent history, lately .revealed and whetted by Author Seldes' The Years of the Locust and Frederick Allen's best-selling Only Yesterday. Cinematically it examines the state of the Union since 1917. These are some of the scenes of the nation's follies and accomplishments in the past 15 years: Front pages screaming WAR. Women knitting, soldiers tramping, Charlie Chaplin selling Liberty Bonds. Swat the Kaiser. Kill the Hun. Ships, ships, ships. "Oh, You Beautiful Doll." The Armistice. The boys come marching home, and the men go marching out of mines and factories suddenly idle. A Paterson police chief, fat and funny, directs his men as they throw women textile workers into a patrol wagon. "Reds" await deportation at Ellis Island. Eugene Debs comes out of jail and Woodrow Wilson sails for the Peace Conference. Henry Cabot Lodge plots destruction for the League of Nations. Three years later, a dying ex-President grins gauntly from the front door of his Washington home. Warren Gamaliel Harding, onetime bandsman of Marion, Ohio, campaigning with a French horn, shakes hands with lodge brothers in pretentious uniforms. The white sheets and the fiery crosses of the Ku Klux Klan. The Harding inauguration. Oil derricks. Albert Bacon Fall. The Harding funeral train. Calvin Coolidge squeezed into a school desk over which his wife presides as schoolmarm. Calvin Coolidge in a cowboy suit, hoeing in a smock. Mah Jong. Marathon dances. Beauty contests. Rum row. Judge Webster Thayer leaving the trial of Sacco & Vanzetti. Automobiles being made. Superfluous automobiles being burned. Tin-can tourists in booming Florida. Women in khaki bloomers. Capt. Lindbergh at Mitchell Field. Gertrude Ederle. Aimee McPherson. A marriage in diving suits. A jazzband playing on the wings of an airplane. Prosperity. Herbert Hoover and Alfred Emanuel Smith. "A chicken in every pot." WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG--Variety. "The year 1931 will offer rewards for investors"-- Roger Babson. "Come to the cross of Jesus Christ"--Billy Sunday. Jimmy Walker stealing an apple off a tree. President Hoover's message to the Republican convention. Smoke from the Bonus army's burning huts hanging like a pall over the Capitol. President Roosevelt on the Capitol steps, prepared to "ask extraordinary powers from the Congress." The New Deal. . . .

Messrs. Ullman & Seldes spent some $30,000 searching out and buying news photographs from newsreel services and from private sources. The original idea was Mr. Ullman's. Under his direction the old films were restored, re-photographed, in some cases re-timed, and fitted for a sound track. Only in the last two of the seven reels is there any actual sound reproduction. Through the rest runs an impartial discourse where it is necessary to introduce a scene. This was written by Author Seldes, is spoken by NBC Announcer Alois Havrilla, who sounds like and is often mistaken for Graham McNamee. But for the most part the pictures ably tell the story. This Is America may be distributed nationally through United Artists by Messrs. Ullman & Seldes. Pilgrimage (Fox). Except for a Parisian street quarrel which might have been directed by Rene Clair, Pilgrimage maintains a respectable tragic pace. It tells the tale of Hannah Jessop (white-haired Henrietta Crosman) and her son Jim (Norman Foster). Mrs. Jessop wanted Jim for herself, all of him. Together they till the soil of their Arkansas farm, a shadowy and sinister place, until Jim falls in love with Mary (Marian Nixon), a besotted neighbor's daughter. A hayloft and a harvest moon do the rest. Rather than give up her son to Mary, hard Hannah Jessop turns him over to a draft board. Jim goes off to War, leaving Mary with a baby. That removes capable Norman Foster from the film, for when snow flies word comes from Washington that Jim has been killed in France.

Mrs. Jessop refuses to recognize her bastard grandson and his mother. She stubbornly tries to forget Jim until an organizer persuades her to go to France with a boatload of Gold Star mothers to visit U. S. cemeteries. In Paris she runs into a young couple about to be thrust into the tragic situation of Jim & Mary. Mrs. Jessop straightens out that affair, returns to Arkansas to make amends for her uncompromising jealousy. Humorous shot: a mountaineer Gold Star mother in a French shooting gallery. Inept shot: Mrs. Jessop boarding a Union Pacific train in her native State. The Narrow Corner (Warner). Some of the novels which William Somerset Maugham writes are infinitely better than others. The Narrow. Corner was not one of the better ones. It concerned two friends on an island in the South Seas. Entirely as a sporting proposition, one of the friends seduced the sensual, predatory fiancee of the other. The seducer went off somewhere after this; the other man killed himself. As adapted for Director Alfred E. Green, The Narrow Corner has been so artlessly hammered into the conventional cinema pattern that all sense of motivation is lost. Patricia Ellis, in whose mouth no butter would melt, is. woefully miscast as the heartless siren. Ralph Bellamy muddles through the ambiguous part of the suicidal Dane. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., with a Ronald Colman voice as well as a Ronald Colman mustache, is too eager to display the results of his recent dramatic coaching. Add to these obstacles a clumsy happy ending, stuck on like the paper pantaloon of a lamb chop. After coming through the weirdest maritime misadventure ever screened, Miss Ellis and Mr. Fairbanks sail off into an inevitable sunset. Saving grace of the film is a characteristically superb performance by Dudley Digges as a philosophical, opium-smoking doctor. Disgraced (Paramount). Lured by a false promise of marriage, Gay Holloway (Helen Twelvetrees) accepts the caresses of Kirk Underwood Jr. (Bruce Cabot), the rich banker's son. He outfits a cosy cottage by the sea to which they repair after she has finished modeling at Maxine's in the afternoons. In spite of his disarming countenance and pleasing ways, Underwood proves to be a cad. So Gay's father, a police captain, shoots him. When the daughter tells the authorities that she did the shooting, Capt. Holloway has to frame an elaborate trap so that he may stand trial for the murder of her seducer. The jury's decision is left to the audience. Best of Enemies (Fox) brings Charles ("Buddy") Rogers--once "America's Boy Friend"--back to the screen after an absence of two years. It provides him with the opportunity to exhibit his virtuosity on a number of musical instruments when, as a music student named Jimmie Hartman, he organizes a jazzband in Germany. There he meets Lena Schneider (Marian Nixon) whose father used to quarrel with his father back in the U. S. Herr Schneider now runs a German beer garden and the plot which prods Best of Enemies along hinges on the question of whether or not Jimmie will be hired to play in the Schneider funspot. There is never any question as to the ultimate embrace between Miss Nixon and Mr. Rogers.

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