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ion B and the murder squad, street corner bombing and houses that flood and unflood at will — these are the authentic Lang materials by way of Thea von Harbou from the Magnet Library. Here are all the old vices and not so many of the virtues. The story is atrocious drivel, the reasoning does not bear inspection, human psychology is totally missing; but the detail is elaborately contrived and some of the situations ingenious and it is all well staged in the good old German style. There is the usual capable playing by Gustav Diessl, Klein-Rogge and Otto Wernicke, reminding us how capable is this school of German acting. What a pity that Lang is so superficial! You feel he has a flair for sensational incident and a knowledge of melodrama which might be useful in cinema if only he had some foundation on which to base his work. Imagine, for instance, a Lang film of the burning of the Reichstag. There is nobody who could handle better the nefarious plot and counterplot, the elaborate scheming that preceded the crime, the precautions undertaken, the drama of the event itself and the floodgates of murder that it opened. It is all astonishing melodrama surpassing anything that Lang or his Mabuse could conceive. But the subsequent trial would need a greater mind than Lang's, a Pabst or a Pudovkin, to bring satire to the tragi-comedy of its chain of self-exposures.
Paul Rotha.
CRIME WITHOUT PASSION
Production, Direction and Script: Charles Mac Arthur-Ben Hecht. Associate Direction and Photography: Lee Garmes. Sets: Albert Johnson. Distribution: Paramount. With Claude Rains, Mar go, Whitney Bourne, Stanley Ridges. Length: 6,080 feet.
We may be excused for paying more than ordinary attention to this very entertaining melodrama, for it not only marks a new departure in production methods of studio films but presents the Hecht-MacArthur writing team in the new role of producerwriters in an attempt, they tell us, to prove that good pictures can be made with a maximum of intelligence in a minimum of time and expense. This is the first of four pictures commissioned for a Paramount release but shot without Hollywood supervision in the Long Island studios at New York with the technical aid of Lee Garmes, erstwhile ace-photographer of Z00 i-n Budapest and Shanghai Express among others. There is nothing especially fresh in this story of a famous criminal lawyer who believes he commits a crime and is ultimately exposed by the skill with which he disguises the murder. It is the familiar mouthpiece story told backwards, with the trial at the beginning instead of at the curtain. But there is something fresh in the treatment applied with its endless succession of original twists, and intelligent dialogue. With the exception of Rains, the
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