The New Pictures

The Mikado (Gilbert & Sullivan Films). The year 1939 is the biggest season Gilbert & Sullivan ever had. Hot on the heels of Broadway's three Mikados--one hallmarked, one half-swing and one pure Harlem--comes the first Mikado in cinema. Made in England's Pinewood Studios last year by Director Victor Schertzinger and a quorum of first-string members of London's famed D'Oyly1"Carte Company, the screen version of the world's most famed operetta is a full-length, Technicolor facsimile of the original.

The Schertzinger Mikado, adapted by Conductor Geoffrey Toye, contains no word that Gilbert, no note that Sullivan, did not write. A few omissions include the duet between Katisha and Ko-Ko, There is beauty in the bellow of the blast and Ko-Ko's song I've got a little list. Sets are far handsomer than any ever seen on the Savoyard stage. Sound recording is approximately perfect. On close inspection, cinemaddicts will note that the Mikado's story conforms strictly to Boy-Meets-Girl pattern; and that Gilbert & Sullivan have not yet been topped by Tin Pan Alley.

Director Victor Schertzinger has long held that the cinema is a better medium for opera than the stage. Composer of the music for The Love Parade (1929), Schertzinger started his campaign to bring opera to the screen when he had Grace Moore trill in One Night of Love, thus setting the fashion for innumerable musical films. Since all works of Gilbert & Sullivan (except The Pirates of Penzance) are in the public domain in the U. S., he could easily have produced The Mikado in Hollywood without paying royalties to the D'Oyly Carte Company, which owns the English rights. Instead, he went abroad to collaborate with Producer Toye, who got the D'Oyly Carte's wholehearted cooperation. The Mikado cost about $1,000,000. Newcomers to Gilbert & Sullivan in its cast are pretty little Jean Colin (Yum-Yum) and Kenny Baker (Nanki-Poo), U. S. radio singer imported for the part. Of Baker the unmollified London Times remarked: "He seems to have learnt English in some place nearer to Japan than London. . . ."

Stolen Life (Orion Productions-Paramount release). Elisabeth Bergner is a tiny, talented Viennese Jewess of 38, of whom German critics were once proud. For five years she has been making movies in English without strongly impressing U. S. audiences. Her English film debut in Catherine the Great was unfortunately shadowed in the U. S. by Marlene Dietrich's ballyhooed The Scarlet Empress, and her most successful picture, Escape Me Never (in which she also played her only Broadway role), was too easy for her to prove much. In Stolen Life, Actress Bergner gets. and takes, her first real chance to show that the German critics used to be right.

Martina and Sylvina Lawrence, twin daughters of an English diplomat (Wilfrid Lawson), can be told apart only when they part their hair on different sides. Within, frivolous, selfish Sylvina and gentle Martina are as different as black & white. When Martina falls in love with a young Englishman (Michael Redgrave) whom she encounters on an alp, Sylvina steps in, nabs him. A sailing spill drowns Sylvina, leaves Martina in possession of her sister's wedding ring, husband, lover, and life--and Actress Bergner with a psychological problem worthy of her steel.

Biggest bets that Stolen Life will make Bergner click with English-speaking audiences were placed by Actress Bergner, her director and husband, Dr. Paul Czinner, and Scenarist Margaret Kennedy (The Constant Nymph, Escape Me Never). All three agreed to waive salary on their efforts, take a chance on sharing whatever profits come in after the picture earns back its $450,000 production cost.

The City (Civic Films), produced by the American Institute of Planners and angeled by the Carnegie Corporation, is an earnest exhortation to better civic planning. For $50,000 no commercial moviemaker has ever assembled such a wealth of talent: an original outline by Documentarian Pare Lorentz (The River), a musical score by Aaron Copland (see p. 60), commentary by Critic Lewis Mumford spoken by Actor Morris Carnovsky, camera work by the top team of Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke. Result is a pointed, camera-wise documentary film that tells its story without wasting a shot.

The story The City tells, from its starting point in a balanced old New England community to a frightening picture study of greater New York in 1939, is a story of men gradually deserting towns built to meet their needs for cities built to meet the needs of their machines. The camera shows how, in crowding together to tend their mechanical masters, they have forsaken the air, space, quiet they need as human beings. The way out, according to The City, is no glossy futuristic metropolis but smaller communities geared in with the current movement to decentralize industry. As The City's cameras abandon New York's nerve-shattering congestion, dwell lovingly on the comforts of the Resettlement Administration's colony at Greenbelt, Maryland,* the sound track booms: "The choice is yours." In choosing to leave its audience to wrestle with the revolutionary economic implications of its theme, The City gains force as a picture, loses some punch as a preachment.

Captain Fury (United Artists-Hal Roach) shows that a Western is always a Western, even in 19th-Century Australia. It also shows that in Hollywood casting anything can happen. Brian Aherne, who owes his Hollywood movie career to his stage success as Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, straps on his guns as Captain Michael Fury, a swashbuckling convict down under, who rebels at forced labor, terrorizes a greedy landowner with Robin Hood tactics, wins the girl and a pardon from the governor. Fastidious Brian Aherne buckles on as many swashes as he can, but about the only thing he and Captain Michael Fury have in common is Irish ancestry. Most natural performances: by kangaroos and koalas, perfectly cast as themselves.

* Where 885 families have been housed at a cost of $13,548,102.

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