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Two film cycles have developed during the quarter. There has been a tendency in the studios to look backward into history for film themes. In addition to Henry VIII we have seen Voltaire, a film innocent of real historical sense and interesting only for the performance of George Arliss; and we are promised, among others, Mary Queen of Scots, Catherine the Great, Queen Christina, Napoleon, and Nell Gwynne. If all of those pictures are as sincere and successful as the Henry VIII film cinemas will benefit in colour and glamour from this renewed interest in the past. A cycle of movie-revues which opened with the excellent Forty-Second Street has continued with Gold Diggers °fJ933 and Moonlight and Melody, and others are in production. There is a regrettable tendency in these new movie-revues to make capital of the depression. Two of them are almost identical in their final numbers, and both, with equal lack of taste, have the American unemployed worker and the "bread line" as their theme. One is called Dusty Feet and the other Forgotten Man.
America's cinema of the quarter has followed familiar lines. Dinner at Eight and Tugboat Annie are exaggerated products of the star system. Another Language and Accidents Wanted reveal a continued dependance on the stage for material. Song of the Eagle, The Mayor of Hell, and The Stranger's Return are variously typical of the American movie's close contact with national life.
Apart from Laurel and Hardy, whose methods are growing familiar, the comedians have been strangely silent, and we have heard nothing from Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante, and the Marx Brothers. There is news, however, of Chaplin. Not only is he making a new film, but he is planning to make a talkie version of The Woman of Paris and numerous short films. It is good to know that Chaplin is working again; it will be better when we see the name of his new film in lights above the theatre.
Meanwhile there have been few foreign films. From Germany came /jjuei Menschen, a tragedy set in the Tyrol, adapted from a novel by Richard Voss and directed by Eric Waschneck. And from from the Soviet studios came Twenty-Six Commissars, a historical impression of the Russian revolution as it affected Baku. The latter film has not yet been shown publicly.
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