Motion Picture (Feb-Jul 1932)

You Need Not Trust To Luck In The Movies HELL DIVERS Beery Stands Out In Fine Picture: Here and now we nominate Wallace Beery's performance as the old type of Navy man, for next year's Award of the Motion Picture Academy. We doubt if anything finer will be done by any actor in the next twelve months. Without this warm and human personality, dominating every scene whether present or not, this would have been a glorified newsieel. But with him it becomes real drama enacted against an epic background of sea and sky. When you add the entire United States Navy to the cast, it's a super-show. The amazing camera angles, the shots of these strange aircraft, the Hell Divers at their dangerous work, the scenes of aeroplanes landing on the deck of the Saratoga with the smoothness and precision of birds, are breathtaking. We must credit Clark Gable for his virile portrayal of the new type of Navy man, and Marjorie Rambeau's study of the robust resort-keeper, but standing out above them all is Wallace Beery. FRANKENSTEIN Unusual Film — Not For The Nervous: Universal has anticipated our criticism of this thriller by a clever prologue, in which one of the characters appears before a curtain and tells the audience that if they don't like horror and fright, they can leave and get their money back at the box office. This warning cannot be made too strong. Children should not be allowed to see this picture. Nervous people should keep away from it. For the strong-stomached, however, it is a new sensation. Its horror is purelyphysical except for the sickening scene where the monster, created from stolen bodies, comes on a child at play. Fantastic backgrounds and fine electrical effects add to this movie nightmare. While all the actors are good, Boris Karloff, as the monster into whom a criminal brain has been put by mistake by his scientist creator (Colin Clive) is superb. His make-up is awe-inspiring and he arouses morbid sympathy as well as loathing. A remarkable picture, but one of its kind is enough. SURRENDER Well Done — By All Means See It: Here's another contribution to the picture propaganda against war, with the fresh background of a German prison camp as locale, and with a singularly interesting group of human beings whom geographical lines have made enemies, but whose tastes and views make them friends. In the place of the horrors of No Man's Land and the trenches, we have the horrors of inaction and starvation in a camp where the captors themselves are hungry. The human angle of men and women compelled to hate each other by tradition is brought out by the particularly fine characterizations of Ralph Bellamy as the mutilated German captain and Warner Baxter as the winning French sergeant. In the end human nature triumphs and everyone surrenders hate and prejudice and principle to a new understanding. The suicide of the crippled captain at the end of the war because "in uniform he was picturesque, but as a man he would be merely pitiable" is great tragedy. A HOUSE DIVIDED Worth Your While — Doiit Miss It: Here is a picture with a really new situation. Against the homely background of a seaside cottage is worked out a drama as stark and dreadful to watch as one of Eugene O'Neill's. Walter Huston, as the hard, grim fisherman who writes a letter to a matrimonial paper and draws a slender, frightened girl in the place of the strapping wife he wanted to do his work, makes a very real character. Equally real are Kent Douglass, as the sensitive son, possessed with a longing to get away from him, and Helen Chandler, as the girl. On his wedding night the father is paralyzed by a fall and thereafter one watches the working out of theis fates as the two young people are drawn together while they watch the cripple slowly regaining his powers and waiting for the time when he will be able to take his shrinking wife in his arms. The violence of the storm which solves their problem and ends the picture seems tawdry beside the storm of emotions that rages in the cottage. 64