The New Pictures

I Stand Condemned (London Films). A wounded officer in a Moscow hospital, on telling a nurse with whom he is in love how much he hates war profiteers, learns that she is engaged to one. Starting with this situation, which might lead almost anywhere, I Stand Condemned develops, presumably from sheer force of cinematic habit, into semi-conventional spy melodrama. A complicated web of circumstantial evidence makes it look as if the young officer were guilty of treason. The profiteer gives the testimony that clears him.

Marked by the scrupulous accuracy in sets characteristic of current British productions and the over-dignified pace characteristic of less recent ones, I Stand Condemned is principally notable for its personnel. Its director was Anthony Asquith, bright young offspring of onetime Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. Its heroine is Socialite Penelope Dudley-Ward. Its hero, the profiteer Brioukov, is Harry Baur, most famed cinemactor in France, making his English-speaking screen debut.

What Emil Jannings was to the German, what Charles Laughton is to the English, Harry Baur has long been to the French cinema. As France's No. 1 character actor, however, his methods are his own. Above a body like a meal sack ap pears a face as soft as putty. On the face wriggle a corrugated nose, two eyebrows which appear to have disassociated sets of muscles. No dabbler in dilettantish restraint, Actor Baur roars like a lion, whispers like a snake, employs every known trick of the method which more inhibited actors contemptuously describe as "mugging." This is a technique which he acquired before the War when, as one of the villains in the Paris Grand Guignol, he used to appear on the stage in La Peste Rouge, wearing a shroud and dripping blood.

Son of middle-class parents who died when he was a child, Harry Baur ran away to Marseille from a government home at 13, worked his way through school, toured the provinces as a peddler, joined the army, prepared funeral wreaths for a florist to pay for diction lessons, after the ambition to be an actor was instilled by his first visit to a theatre-- Lucien Guitry in Amants. Famed for his portrayal of Dr. Moriarty in Sherlock (1907), he was a member in good standing of the Paris pre-War esthete set, friend of Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob. Forgotten by his public when the War was over, he worked his way up in bit parts, made his cinema debut in Gap Perdu (1930). U. S. audiences have seen him as the father in Poll de Carotte, in the French version of Les Miserables.

Two Against the World (Warner). This appraisal of the brevity of the public's memory may be correct, but it is also unflattering to Warner Brothers' own product. Two Against the World--a re-make of the Warner smash Five Star Final (1931)--does not offer its famed prototype the courtesy of alteration, but simply stuffs it into a radio-station and mans it with stock company people. Sherry Scott (Humphrey Bogartj is the manager of a radio-chain who, in obedience to his hypocritical boss, rakes up a 20-year-old murder story as material for a serial play Sin Doesn't Pay. Glory Penbrook (Helen MacKeller) is the ex-murderess who commits suicide when the consequences of her grey past, horribly disinterred, menace her daughter's marriage. Even without the punch lines of Louis Weitzenkorn's dialog and its alien back-ground the situation is strong enough to be good entertainment for those who missed the original.

The Return of Sophie Lang (Paramount) is a shipboard anecdote of a thief's (Gertrude Michael) redemption. Force opposing: Sir Guy Standing as Max Bernard, a scoundrel trying to compel Miss Lang to resume the racket she faked death to desert. Force assisting: Ray Milland, once of the late George V's palace guards, as Jimmy Dawson, a reporter so infatuated that he was in the habit of leaving bouquets on the supposed grave of Miss Lang inscribed "in memory of glamour." Plot development consists mostly of the pastime, so popular at Paramount this year, of passing stolen jewelry around (Big Brown Eyes, Desire, Florida Special). It is mounted with atmospheric travel shots, big blue & white sundecks, the usual competent Michael performance. Sample line, by Sir Guy Standing: "I have reached the age of wisdom, when a pretty woman is no more than the setting for the emerald at her throat." Denouement: the jewels planted on Bernard by Dawson.

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