The New Pictures

David Copperfield (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). David Copperfield as a child is Freddie Bartholomew. As a young man, he is Frank Lawton. Rubbing together his malevolent hands, twitching his sly nose as Uriah Heep is Roland Young. Mr. Wickfield, the lawyer whom Uriah tries hard to cheat, is Lewis Stone. An obscure actress named Jessie Ralph performs magnificently as Nurse Peggotty, who comforts David when his mother dies and cares for his household when he marries. As Peggotty's brother Dan, who sets out to avenge Little Emily when David's friend Steerforth betrays her, Lionel Barrymore wears the chin whiskers of a Yarmouth fisherman. David's widowed mother (Elizabeth Allen); Mr. Murdstone (Basil Rathbone) who marries her, frightens her to death and packs David off to earn his living; violent Aunt Betsey (Edna May Oliver), who befriends David and beats such visitors as ride donkeys to her Dover cottage; Mr. Dick (Lennox Pawle), her shrewd, erratic house guest who was always getting the head of King Charles I into his writings; Dora (Maureen O'Sullivan) who uses the account book for sketching and whose spaniel lives in a pagoda; Agnes (Madge Evans), whom David marries when Dora dies--all these and a dozen other great Dickensian characters live and move and have their being in this picture. Best of the lot, though, is Mr. Micawber, played by W. C. Fields, red-nosed, dazzled, grandiloquent and undespairing. It is Micawber, hounded by creditors but never for an instant quailing at their squalid naggings, who first protects young David Copperfield in London. It is Micawber whose fine denunciation of Uriah Heep brings David Copperfield finally to its conclusion.

In making David Copperfield, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer went to vast expense and trouble. Before assembling his cast, Producer David Selznick journeyed to England with Director George Cukor and Scenarist Howard Estabrook. They brought back Author Hugh Walpole, to add his famed name to Scenarist Estabrook's act briefly as the Vicar of Blunderstone in the film. Five hundred boys were tested for the part of David before little Freddie Bartholomew of Wiltshire, England was picked. The picture cost approximately $1,000,000 and took a year to make. The result of all this money and mind, time and talent is, in David Copperfield, an example of the cinema's ability to use one masterpiece to create another. As rich, uproarious, tragic and astonishing as its original, it falls short in only one department. Twice as long as an ordinary picture, it lasts only two hours and ten minutes.

The County Chairman (Fox). "Day after election," says Will Rogers to his impeccable young law partner, "people don't come around and say: 'Did you conduct your campaign clean and digni-fied?' They come around and say: 'Boy, did you win?' Now that's politics in a nutshell."

In The County Chairman, adapted from oldtime Slangster George Ade's play produced in 1903, Chairman Rogers makes his law partner a candidate for prosecuting attorney to oppose the pompous rascal who stole the woman Rogers loved in his youth. Complications arise from the fact that the Rogers candidate (Kent Taylor) loves the opponent's daughter (Evelyn Venable).

Meanwhile Mr. Rogers enjoys being driven around the countryside by black, bemused Stepin Fetchit, making political speeches to audiences of one; explaining to his protege the niceties of mud-slinging and baby-kissing. He avoids all mention of Democrats and Republicans but provides his admirers with a generous assortment of whimsies on other subjects. Reading in his newspaper that a woman has gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel, he observes: "Don't see why they give this female so much credit--seems like the barrel should get most of it." Good shot: Rogers waking himself up by mumbling in his sleep at a meeting, rapping his gavel in the hushed room and shouting, "Quiet! quiet!"

Chapayev (Amkino). In 1918, Chapayev, a Russian carpenter who had served through the War as a private, organized a troop of peasants and workers to fight the Whites near the Caspian Sea. Red Commander Frunze sent a commissar to help him work his guerrilla soldiers into a disciplined unit of the Red Army. Chapayev, based on the story written by the commissar, D. A. Furmanov, is a brusque, factual and exciting record of its hero's brief period of notable activity. It begins with Chapayev's rescue of a village captured by Whites. It shows his jealous chagrin when the commissar arrives, traces the course of a small romance between Chapayev's chief aide and a girl machine-gunner, comes to a climax with the Reds' brilliant victory over a troop of Cossacks. It ends with Chapayev's death, in a rain of machine-gun bullets, as he swims a river to escape White cavalry already trapped by a Red rescue force.

Currently the most popular film in Russia, Chapayev played simultaneously in 17 Moscow theatres, brought Directors Sergei and Georgi Vasilyev and their staff a 45,000-ruble government prize. U. S. admirers of the Russian cinema, for whom it was released last fortnight with English titles, will not find it difficult to see why. On the tragedy of Chapayev's life and death it focuses that humorous, objective and enlightened perception which belongs to the best Russian literature and to a few earlier Soviet pictures. Though it includes few of the salaamings that make most such "documentary" films impenetrably dull to non-Communist audiences, it makes the Robert Clive of the Russian Revolution appear more heroic and more human than the central figure in Hollywood's current excursion into the realm of British imperialism. Good shot: Chapayev (Boris Bobochkin) using a crock of potatoes and a package of cigarets to show Furmanov where a commander should stand when his soldiers are in action.

The White Cockatoo (Warner). Adapted from a story by Mignon G. Eberhart, this picture deals with murders, frights, thefts and plots in a moldy hotel on the French Riviera. Who, on that wild & windy night, killed the bearded stranger? Who, fired five shots at resourceful Jim Sundean (Ricardo Cortez)? Why did the U. S. heiress (Jean Muir), who is so refined that she says "presume" for "suppose" and "abduct" for "kidnap," behave so suspiciously? When all the answers are finally in, the crimes turn out to be so involved that the surviving characters must make little speeches explaining them. An atmospheric rather than a cerebral mystery, the picture takes its name from a bird that crime-detecting cinemagoers will do well to watch closely.

Romance in Manhattan (RKO) exhibits that disheveled Czechoslovakian Francis Lederer in another expose of his ingratiating and elaborately maintained naivete. This time he is an immigrant who, arriving in the U. S. with less pocket money than required by the regulations, has to swim ashore. Wandering in an amiable daze up Broadway, he meets a golden-hearted chorus girl (Ginger Rogers) who feeds, shelters and eventually marries him.

Pleasantly played by its principals and directed by Stephen Roberts in the Capra tradition, all this makes an entertaining small-fry comedy, distinguished by its skyline and a few exceptionally funny sequences. Good shot: a friendly mounted policeman threatening to arrest the immigrant for feeding his horse carrots.

Clive of India (Twentieth Century). "Here was a man who, at 21, was earning $25 a year as a clerk with the East India Company. ... At 26 this young man was conqueror of southern India; at 34, Lord Clive of Plassey, one of the richest men in England. The great irony of his story is that when he worked only for personal ambition, he was tremendously successful; but when, in later years, he threw self-seeking aside and worked only from patriotic motives, he was pilloried, nearly impeached in Parliament. . . . All this is only the background for the love story of Robert and Margaret Clive. . . Here is a woman with the courage to go all the way to India ... to meet a man she had never seen, a man who had written one . . . letter after seeing her portrait in a locket. She arrived, expecting to meet a poor clerk and found herself face to face with a young conqueror. . . . dive's life was pure romance--I almost said 'Hollywood romance'--but in this case, truth beats all fiction. . . ."

This statement, by W. P. Lipscomb, co-author with Rubeigh James Minney of Clive of India, suggests both the defects and virtues of the picture. Its principal defect is that, as material for cinema biography, Clive's life contained too much. Consequently, Authors Lipscomb & Minney felt obliged to condense the siege of Arcot into a subtitle, while devoting extensive footage to the efforts of Margaret Clive (Loretta Young) to keep her husband (Ronald Colman) in England when he felt that his destiny lay in India. Its virtue is that no account of such a career could be more than occasionally dull. Ronald Colman (minus the mustache which has long been his trademark) and Loretta Young manage to give lively performances without losing 18th Century decorum. During the battle of Plassey, with armored elephants charging like tanks, during dive's bitter reply to his detractors on the floor of the House of Commons, Clive of India ceases to be merely interesting and reflects the brilliance and the color of Its hero. Good shot: the Black Hole of Calcutta,* photographed from above.

*In June 1756, Suraj-ud-Dowlah, Nawab of Bengal, capturing Fort William at Calcutta, put 146 English prisoners into a dungeon, 18 ft. by 14 ft., with two small windows. After one night in the dungeon, all but 23 of the prisoners were dead. The shot of the Black Hole of Calcutta in Clive of India cost $30,000, stays on the screen for 15 seconds.

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