Cinema Quarterly (1933 - 1934)

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film from the entertainment film. Symbols such as a hand clutching a piece of earth become merely sentimental patriotism, the oppression of people becomes just another high spot. The actors wade through lathers of cheap American sentimentality ; the leading of a revolution is degraded to the posturing of movie stars. Pancho Villa is played by Beery as a villain with a heart of gold beneath a rugged exterior ; he alternates between slobbering mawkishness and brutal half-wittedness. All the stock situations and characters are grafted on to a theme that should have swept outside personalities into the larger heroisms of mass action. Leo Carrillo as Villa's assistant is the only character in the film. Dialogue, by Ben Hecht, is first rate. Production is very uneven, with the camerawork better than the Mexican Tisse. The film ends leaving everything fine in Mexico, and there is not a word about the peons of whom so much was heard in the earlier reels, not a word about their continued exploitation by business interests. Comparison with October should prove interesting and should go further to convince those at the crossroads of cinema that the film is not an art nor an entertainment, but an instrument of propaganda. D. F. Taylor. SCARLET EMPRESS Production and Distribution: Paramount. Direction: Josef von Sternberg. Photography: Bert Glennon. With Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser. Length, 8,806 feet. Seldom has there been a picture so reminiscent of other pictures. Almost every scene brings thoughts of Lubitsch, Stroheim, Dupont, Garmes, Mamoulian and even the surrealist Bunuel; inasmuch that this glamorous, sadistic fabrication appears one long procession of derivative ideas. Yet you cannot help laughing at Sternberg for his undisguised showman's tactics, his fake artistic clap-trap and his succulent debaucheries of photographic slickness; although here he is a Sternberg far removed from the simple days of Salvation Hunters and Docks of New York. Experience has taught him extravagance. Not one candle but a thousand ; not one honest-to-god rape but a skilfully staged scene of perversion. He has reached that delectable state of ecstasy when he can throw away a twenty-five hundred dollar shot on a two-foot wipe and never move a muscle. Decadence indeed. Comparison with Korda's Catherine the Great is as inevitable as it is instructive, and it is diverting to inspect two directors' handling of similar situations. Whereas the Korda-Czinner approach was gentle 251