The New Pictures

The Invisible Man (Universal). While other Hollywood producers confine themselves to the humdrum mishaps of prostitutes, millionaires and college footballers, Carl Laemmle Jr's Universal studio specializes darkly in supernatural pasquinades. The hero of The Invisible Man is as nasty a pumpkinhead as Frankenstein's monster or The Mummy. He is a young physician named Griffin, whose love for beauteous Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart) is not sufficient to prevent him from discovering a drug which not only makes him invisible but turns him simultaneously into a homicidal lunatic.

The first thing Dr. Griffin does when he is out of sight is to wrap his body, which remains solid, in garb as unprepossessing as he can find. Well aware that when he removes the bindings from his face or the trousers from his legs, there will be nothing there, he takes pleasure in frightening the host of a village inn by doing so. Presently he kills a policeman and then, intoxicated by the certainty that he can commit crimes with no possibility of being detected, he wrecks a train, kills another young doctor whom he has forced to be his partner, plans to make himself a world dictator--for by using his drug in wholesale quantities, he can have an invisible army. These plans of Dr. Griffin's are foiled in a manner which must not have been ingenious enough to satisfy Carl Laemmle Jr. The invisible man has already realized that he must not operate after meals until his food has been transparently digested and that he must never go out in the rain lest water, collecting on the tip of his vague nose, betray his presence. He is stupid enough, none the less, to go to sleep in a barn one snowy night. When he comes out a posse of policemen shoot him in his tracks.

In his first cinema role, which must have been easy for him to play since it amounts to very little more than an offstage noise, Claude Rains gives an alarming performance, almost as frightening when he is present as when he is not. Good shot: a poker, with which Dr. Griffin is planning to hit someone, stirring uneasily beside its fireplace.

The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau). A young man engaged in painting a portrait is suddenly disturbed to find, in the palm of his hand, a surprising deformity: two human lips which engage him in a fragmentary conversation. The young man succeeds in transferring these lips to a statue of a young woman, who advises him to walk through a mirror. Having done so, the young man finds himself in the Hotel des Folies Dramatiques where, peeking through keyholes, he witnesses a horrid scene between an old lady and a child whom she is teaching to fly. When he emerges from the mirror, the young man finds himself transformed into a statue above a courtyard where children are fighting with snowballs. Snowballs eventually smash the young man in his statuary form. Dressed in evening clothes, at a table in the snow, he plays cards with the young lady who advised him to walk through the mirror, no longer marble now but a solemn and equivocal Muse. A polite audience chuckles at the game from the balconies of the courtyard. When the young man tries to cheat and fails, he puts a bullet through his brain.

When Le Sang d'un Poet--Novelist Jean Cocteau's effort to use cinema as a medium for autobiographical poetry--opened in Paris last year its consequences were even more extraordinary than its contents. The audience at the premiere, expecting a conventional program picture, engaged in a riot. Royalists, always on the qui vive for a disturbance, attacked it for reasons of their own. His was not the only well-known Parisian name connected with Le Sang d'un Poet. Its heroine was Lee Miller, famed both as a photographer and as a model, whom Cocteau had selected for the role. Cocteau's backer was the Vicomte de Noailles, who allowed his house to be used for sets and invited his socialite friends to take minor roles. Le Sang d'un Poet, because it followed another de Noailles production which showed bishops turning into skeletons, caused the Vicomte to be 1) forced to resign from the Jockey Club; 2) excommunicated. U. S. audiences are likely to be less disturbed by Novelist Cocteau's nightmare metaphors but they may find them--accompanied by Cocteau's voice, in interpolations for emphasis or elucidation, and by George Auric's sombre score--a shade less unintelligible than they sound. Typical shots: A cow with a hide made of maps; blood flowing from the mouth of a small boy; a black man with small gauze wings; wire masks; stars, muzzles of guns, the Virgin Mary, a sofa-back through which emerges a man's head.

Duck Soup (Paramount). Any country governed by Groucho Marx would likely become a shambles. Freedonia,* the scene of this picture, has Groucho for dictator, Brother Zeppo for his secretary. Freedonia's collapse is only delayed by Brothers Chico and Harpo as spies for a rival principality. Groucho is engaged simultaneously in making love to and insulting the richest lady in Freedonia. He is also doing his best to foment war by abusing Ambassador Trentino (Louis Calhern) of Sylvania who makes the mistake of hiring Chico and Harpo. They enter his office armed to the teeth with alarm clocks, scissors for cutting off coat tails, cigar butts and assorted bells. Assigned to pry into the affairs of Groucho, they begin by rolling a peanut stand under his window, making such a disturbance that to keep them quiet he makes Harpo his chauffeur, appoints Chico secretary of war. In the course of conducting their "spy business," Harpo finds three opportunities to run after young women. Chico successfully restrains him. When Chico is tried by Freedonia's supreme court, Groucho feels sorry for him. "This abject specimen . . ." he says. Says Chico: "I abject." When Freedonia finally gets into war, its armies are superior to those of most mythical kingdoms because they contain monkeys and elephants, but they sustain a shameful, shattering defeat.

With more plot and fewer girls than most Marx Brothers comedies, Duck Soup has the disadvantage of adding nothing to vary the essential technique of their efforts. It exhibits Chico & Zeppo as usual, Groucho less flatteringly than in Horsefeathers. Admirers of Harpo should be particularly pleased with his horrid actions in Duck Soup. He carries a plumber's blow torch for a cigaret lighter, conducts a wordless telephone conversation by means of horns and bells, irritates a lemonade vendor by doing sleight-of-hand with his straw hat. Good shot: Harpo, impersonating Groucho in order to steal "war plans," trying to convince Groucho that he is a reflection in a mirror when the two meet in a hallway.

Only Yesterday (Universal). John Boles herein occupies a role which demonstrates some of the dangers of absentmindedness. A pompous young lieutenant, at a country club dance, meets an impressionable Virginia belle (Margaret Sullavan), promptly seduces her, then goes to France without bothering to say goodbye.

When the girl greets him on his return, he has forgotten her face. Ten years later he meets her at a New Year's party and spends another night in her company, still ignorant of her identity. The result of their first meeting was an illegitimate child. Miss Sullavan becomes this sea son's most long suffering heroine by dying of heart disease just before the picture ends, after sending a long letter to her lieutenant, now a stockbroker ruined by the Crash. More sadly than reproachfully, she reminds him of her existence and tells him that he has a son. The picture, told in a long flashback, starts when Lieutenant Emerson, sitting down at his desk with the intention of shooting himself, sees the letter. When he is through reading, he has forgotten about suicide.

Only Yesterday--the title was borrowed from Frederick Lewis Allen's historical review of the 1920's--may tax the credulity of supercilious cinemaddicts. It should please those who last year admired Director John Stahl's Back Street. Margaret Sullavan, a young Virginia actress given the lead in Universal's most ambitious production of the season after two seasons of stock and two on the Manhattan stage (A Modern Virgin, Chrysalis), gives a fluent performance, the more remarkable because her Southern accent sounds neither negroid nor vanilla.

*Mayor Harry B. Hickey of Fredonia, N. Y. protested to the Marxes: "The name of Fredonia has been without a blot since 1817. I feel it is my duty as Mayor to question your intentions in using the name of our city in your picture." Back cracked the Marxes: "Your excellency: Our advice is that you change the name of your town. It is hurting our picture. Anyhow, what makes you think you are Mayor of Fredonia? Do you wear a black moustache, play the harp, speak with an Italian accent or chase girls like Harpo? We are certain you do not. Therefore we must be Mayor of Fredonia, not you. The old gray Mayor ain't what he used to be."

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