The New Pictures

The Emperor Jones (United Artists). In Eugene O'Neill's play, the most effective scenes were the ones which showed Brutus Jones, deposed and terrified, scrambling through a forest made dreadful by darkness, ghosts and the drums of a pursuit. These sequences are the least convincing in the cinema produced by John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran. Fading in pictures of the shapes that the Emperor Jones thinks he sees somehow makes the shapes less real, less frightening. The elaborate hysteria that makes Jones waste the silver bullet he has been saving for himself and, after wandering in circles, come gibbering back to be riddled by the bullets of his subjects, seems a little implausible. This may be partly because Paul Robeson, playing his first cinema role with effortless honesty, has in the earlier part of the story made the Emperor Jones a person so plainly and completely real.

Brutus Jones is pleased with his uniform when he gets a job as Pullman porter, gratified by the girl he steals from his friend Jeff. When Jeff comes at him with a knife, Brutus kills him and goes to a chain gang. When a guard whips him, he kills the guard, sets off as stoker on a boat bound for Jamaica, swims ashore when the boat passes an inviting island. Here Brutus Jones comes to his great days. He works for a white trader (Dudley Digges), forces the trader to make him a partner, bluffs the island's black king off his throne. For two and a half years he struts in his palace, wearing patent leather boots and admiring his magnificent body in a corridor of mirrors he has placed there for the purpose. He has almost satisfied his desire to get enough money to retire to a country where there are no Jim Crow laws when, one day, he wakes up in an empty palace. He sets off, still grinning, to beat his way through the forest to the coast.

Ably directed by Dudley Murphy--who had been wanting to make the picture for ten years and who got Producers Cochran & Krimsky interested when he showed them his script last spring--The Emperor Jones is clearly intended as much for O'Neill audiences as for the cinema public. Producers Cochran & Krimsky imported Maedchen in Uniform last season. They are now in Paris trying to persuade Director Rene Clair to come to the U. S. Convinced that moving pictures do not need mass audiences to be financially successful, they are planning to back their belief with three or four more pictures in the next year. The Emperor Jones was made at Paramount's old Astoria, L. I. studio. It is less ambitious than last winter's operatic version of what has come to be regarded as a U. S. classic. Almost all the dialog is O'Neill's; he approved of a few additions made by DuBose Heyward to expand the beginning of the story. Good shot: Jones teaching a handful of what he scornfully calls "bush-niggers" how to shoot craps.

Brief Moment (Columbia) exhibits the difficulties that attend the marriage of an intelligent night club hostess to a wealthy ne'er-do-well. Abby Fane (Carole Lombard) marries Roderick Deane (Gene Raymond) with a very clear idea of what his family's reaction will be. In the course of a prolonged honeymoon, she acquires culture, fashionable boredom, a suspicion that her husband is more stupid than she thought at first. He enjoys being sponged on by his friends, particularly approves of a languid professional punster named Harold Sigrift (Monroe Owsley). Abby badgers Roderick into going to work for his father's firm. When he retires, humiliated by his incompetence, she scandalizes his parents by leaving him and going to work herself, at her old job. Finally Roderick comes to her with a pay check he has earned. Abby decides that since she cannot love anyone else, she and Roderick might as well make the best of it together.

Considerably less evanescent than the play by Samuel N. Behrman in which, performing as Sigrift, Critic Alexander Woollcott scored a sedentary success, Brief Moment emerges in the cinema as a bright investigation of small problems, slick, chipper and reasonably entertaining. Most inevitable shot: Owsley, inveterate cad of the films, sneering at Abby across his cocktail glass.

Berkeley Square (Fox). Peter Standish, a young American living in a London house inherited from his British forbears, finds himself one afternoon in a situation dear to romantic playwrights: transported into the Past. In his drawing room he finds the Pettigrew family, comfortably sure that they are living in the 18th Century. It appears to them that he is an earlier Peter Standish, their Colonial cousin, back from the Revolution, engaged to marry Kate Pettigrew. It is a stormy day and the Pettigrews are a little astonished to find, when Peter Standish walks in, that his feet are dry.

Presently the Pettigrews have further cause for astonishment. Peter Standish uses words like "cockeyed," "cigaret," "tank." He sits to Sir Joshua Reynolds, praises as his masterpiece a portrait not yet completed. He bewilders the Duchess of Devonshire with epigrams from Oscar Wilde, offends her by the historical tone of his compliments. He is not interested in Kate Pettigrew. He loves her sister Helen but he knows, from old diaries, that Peter Standish married Kate and Helen died when she was very young. Faced by the wry problem of an emotion at once timeless and defeated, Peter Standish finally finds himself back in the 20th Century, but not entirely of it. He knows now why the epitaph on Helen Pettigrew's grave is cut so deep.

A happy combination of sentiment, metaphysical poetry and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, Berkeley Square has all the qualifications of a succes d'estime and most qualifications for success at the box office. Producer Jesse Lasky--one of the few oldtime cinemagnates who have kept up with the times--did a first-rate job which began with hiring Frank Lloyd, who made Cavalcade, to direct; borrowing Leslie Howard, who played the role in John Balderston's play, to act Peter Standish; using a new British ingenue, Heather Angel, for Helen Pettigrew. Heather Angel's name is not a pseudonym. Daughter of an Oxford lecturer who was killed in the War, she attended a London dramatic school, took to the stage when its headmistress died. Her first real part was in the London stage production of The Sign of the Cross. Good shot: Peter Standish wondering whether history ("It doesn't happen that way") is really sufficient reason for not breaking off his engagement with Kate Pettigrew.

Mr. Broadway (Broadway-Hollywood) is a feature-length production based on the frail supposition that the spectacle of a Broadway colyumist introducing pseudo-celebrities constitutes entertainment. It shows Colyumist Ed Sullivan of the New York Daily News chatting with patrons and performers at three Manhattan cafes, includes glimpses of Lupe Velez, Primo Camera, Ruth Etting, Ernst Lubitsch, et al. amiably dancing, talking, bowing. Best shot: Pugilist Maxie Rosenbloom looking bored.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.