The New Pictures

The Goldwyn Follies (Samuel Goldwyn). Producer Goldwyn is no subscriber to the theory of his rival producer, Darryl Zanuck: that a screen musicomedy should be tightly woven, integrating songs and dances as part of its body proper. Mr. Goldwyn's technique is to spin a revue: a slender thread of narrative linking a series of specialties.

The specialties displayed in The Goldwyn Follies are sometimes brilliant, sometimes dull, always expensive. The Ritz

Brothers do three violent routines, sing a song, Pussy Pussy, that has hit possibilities. Zorina and the Metropolitan Opera ballet appear in two elaborate dances, one a banal number, the other (high point of the picture) a superlatively beautiful water nymph dance in which Zorina, in skintight gold tunic, rises from the bottom of a fountain to astound a gentleman in dinner clothes. The Goldwyn girls, trade-mark of every Sam Goldwyn musical, appear only in the jazz v. classics ballet, are sorely missed thereafter.

Net result--a choppy extravaganza with many features to suit all tastes and not enough of any of them to suit anybody's.

The Dybbuk (Ludwig Prywes). In Yiddish folklore, a dybbuk (pronounced dee-book) is a disembodied soul, denied peace in after life because of some earthly transgression, seeking refuge in the body of one it has loved. Twenty years ago, the late Playwright Solomon Rappaport, writing as S. Ansky, wove the myth of the dybbuk into a Jewish folk play. The Dybbuk has since become the most famous item in Yiddish drama, even more widely known than The Golem (TIME, March 29). Every major city in the world has seen it staged; it has been translated into 17 tongues, including Esperanto. Rappaport died before his play was produced, but he left the rights to it in trust for the poor of Warsaw's ghetto. Last week, for the benefit of Polish Jews, Manhattan cinemagoers paid as high as $10 a seat to see The Dybbuk's U. S. premiere as a motion picture.

What they saw was a laboriously reverent folk story of a people held in ritualistic bondage, governed in every phase of relationship by shibboleths, superstition, fear. Produced in Poland with native players as passionately sincere as if their own souls were involved. The Dybbuk presents a painstaking picture of the weary search for eternal peace by a people for whom the earth holds little, affords an insight into the absurd involvements that are the accretions of simple faith.

As a study and an unintended indictment of the forms & symbols that circumscribe its people, The Dybbuk is important. As cinema it is tedious, technically crude, lacking in coherence. Here and there are pictorial groupings, interesting enough in themselves, but poorly related in the general clutter of hyper-religious abracadabra and the familiar hocus-pocus of third-rate melodrama. The mere mention of Kabala brings on thunder-and-lightning overtones; a departing soul is the signal for banging casements, flickering candles, fluttering curtains. Valiantly pushing its way through is a slender story of a boy (L. Libgold) and a girl (Lili Liliana) promised to each other at birth, driven to desperation when they are parted. The boy invokes Satan and goes to destruction; the girl invites his wandering soul to enter her body as a dybbuk. Climax of the film, the exorcising of the dybbuk from her body by the rabbinical council, makes the rites of witchcraft seem like Hallowe'en pranks.

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