The New Pictures

Viva Villa (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Pancho Villa was a Mexican cattle-thief and revolutionist who, in 1916. eluded with humiliating ease a $130,000,000 expedition under General Pershing sent to punish him for killing U. S. men and women in raids on town--. These doings and his private life was irresponsible a is might appear to make him ble as the hero of a U. S. cinema epic. Such is not the case. Viva Villa, with adroit omissions and exaggerations, makes Mexico's most famed outlaw an estimable child of nature, noble if crude, an illiterate amalgamation of Don Quixote, Dillinger and Napoleon, wrhose more serious misdemeanors, like robbery, arson, lechery and wholesale slaughter of prisoners, are excusable on the grounds of good intentions.

When first seen in Viva Villa, Pancho (Phillip Cooper) is a ten-year-old peon brat watching the underlings of a haciendado beat the life out of Villa Sr. He shoots the flogger, scampers into the hills. He is next to be observed grown up into Wallace Beery, head of a plundering horseback gang, with a lieutenant named Sierra (Leo Carillo) and a childlike appetite for shootings and hangings. When Francisco Madero (Henry B. Walthall), who was historically Mexico's president from November 1911 to February 1913. appears on the scene he realizes Villa's usefulness, invites him to make his gang a regiment.

As a captain under Madero, Villa captures towns in the north of Mexico whenever he feels like it. He takes Santa Rosalia against the orders of a superior officer. General Pascal (Joseph Schildkraut), to oblige a U. S. newspaperman (Stuart Erwin) who has written the story in advance. To oblige a wench named Rosita (Katherine de Mille, sultry daughter of Producer Cecil Blount de Mille) Villa has the newspaperman conduct a wedding ceremony. When Madero goes to Mexico City, there is no further work for Villa. He gets into a scrape for killing a bank cashier who is slow about cashing a check for him, finds himself exiled to Texas where he becomes a down-at-heel barfly.

The epic portion of Viva Villa arrives when Sykes, the U. S. newspaperman, arrives to tell Villa that Pascal, whom Villa hates, has killed little Madero, whom Villa loves. Villa borrows $7 from Sykes and starts for Mexico City with five friends and a hangover. This time he fights without regard for niceties. Prisoners of war he ties together and shoots down in lots of three, to save bullets. He administers a beating to Teresa del Castillo, sister of a haciendado who had supported Madero but refuses to support Villa. He takes Chihuahua by storm and executes General Pascal by smearing him with honey, feeding him to ants. He marches into Mexico City at the head of an army of 60,000. Rather than bother with a budget, he has $100,000,000 in bills sent over from the printers.

In Mexico City. Villa is not a success. He goes home presently to Chihuahua. He is buying a dozen pork chops for his newest girl when Don Felipe del Castillo, watching from a window across the street, leans out and shoots him dead.

Adapted by Ben Hecht from Edgcumb Pinchon's biography, Viva Villa is an incisive and not too euphemistic story, a superbly mounted spectacle which combines most of the advantages of Eisenstein's Thunder Over Mexico and David Wark Griffith's antiquated Birth of a Nation. Since talkies arrived, outdoor epics in Hollywood have usually been concerned with animals, Eskimos or airplanes. Viva Villa is an old-school epic with up-to-date manners. It is grand, minute, inclusive and compact. It is all the more remarkable because, in the 18 months it took to make, it often looked as if the picture would never be produced at all.

Producer David Selznick bought Edgcumb Pinchon's book, mainly for the title. in 1932, hired Oliver Garrett and Wallace Smith, a newspaper reporter who had known Villa, to write a script. After several months' work, the script was scrapped. Ben Hecht was hired to write a new one in three weeks. Howard Hawks was assigned to direct. Two companies were sent to make location shots in Mexico. After three weeks, Producer Selznick decided Hawks's work made Villa more like a Mexican Al Capone than a hillbilly patriot, ordered Director Hawks back to Hollywood. Director Hawks was on his way when all the usable film made by his unit and another headed by Associate Director Richard Rosson was burned in an airplane crash. Two days before Lee Tracy, cast for the role now played by Stuart Erwin, had made a nuisance of himself on a Mexico City balcony (TIME, Dec. 4 et seq.). To placate the Mexican Government, Tracy and two other members of the cast had to be discharged.

Work on the picture with a new director. Jack Conway. and new actors, was interrupted when first Beery, then Carillo. finally Conway fell ill with influenza. Small Phillip Cooper contracted dysentery from eating too much Mexican fruit. While remaking the burned battle scenes, for which the Mexican Government at first refused to furnish troops a second time, two Mexican stunt riders were killed. When the print was previewed for the first time, Director Slavko Vorkapich, "transition" specialist, had to be called in to improve sequences of Villa's march to Mexico City. Associate Director Rosson was sent to Mexico City to make more complimentary shots of the city. Finally, Viva Villa was exhibited to President Rodriguez and his cabinet. They were satisfied except for scenes which showed Villa drunk. When these scenes had been deleted, lines inserted to emphasize that the picture was a historical rather than contemporary comment on Mexico, Viva Villa, Hollywood's most notorious jinx picture since Hell's Angels, had cost about $1,000,000 (less than Tarzan or Eskimo). Most elaborate productions, like Wings, Beau Geste, Birth of a Nation, Ben Hur, which have experienced comparable difficulties have been successful at box-offices. Viva Villa has already acquired $320.000 worth of bookings in Mexico, may outsell Ben Hur which holds the Mexican record.

You're Telling Me (Paramount). Chief attributes of W. C. Fields are a whiskey nose, a whiskey voice and a curiously comic gaucherie well suited to slapstick cinema. As Sam Bisbee in his first starring picture he now plays an amiable, henpecked dipsomaniac who putters away at various "inventions" ranging from a puncture-proof tire to such Rube-Goldbergian contraptions as a keyhole-finder for drunks, a "nose-lifter-upper" to pre vent snoring. Because Sam Bisbee lives on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, his daughter's romance with the son of the town's leading snob has small chance of fruition. To improve his station Inventor Bisbee goes to the city, seeks to demonstrate with a pistol his tires' impenetrability. When the bullets instead of bouncing puncture all four tires, he discovers he has mistaken a police car for his own. Frustrated in his dream of wealth, he sadly takes a train for home, attempts to drink iodine on the way. Dissuaded just in time by passing sight of a cemetery, he wanders into the stateroom of a Russian princess.

The princess, played charmingly by beauteous Adrienne Ames, takes a platonic fancy to him, makes him the town socialite when she visits his home. Chosen by the Mayor to open a new country club, Funnyman Fields does his famed golf routine, ably assisted by frozen-faced Tammany Young. The hilarity ends happily when Bisbee's tire sells and his daughter, an inconspicuous blonde named Joan Marsh, becomes engaged to Buster Crabbe.

Good shot: Fields and a pet ostrich burying their heads in a sandpile to escape detection by pursuing police.

W. C. Fields (euphemism for William Claude Dukinfield) is a onetime juggler, born 55 years ago in Philadelphia. His stage career began at $5 a week, reached $5,000 with Florenz Ziegfeld and Earl Carroll. No relation of famed Lew (Weber &) Fields, he has played Europe, India, Africa, Hawaii, New Zealand, Samoa, Australia. He likes to recall the Atlantic City beer garden where he and an obscure cornetist named Frank Tinney staged a daily drowning act. Proud possessor of a Phi Beta Kappa key, which he found, Fields is mildly eccentric, wears snakeskin shoes, sleeps in silk underwear, dislikes people who ask if his nose is made of putty.

The Constant Nymph (Fox-Gaumont-British). From-Margaret Kennedy's gentle, atmospheric best-seller of a few years back, Director Basil Dean has evoked a gentle, atmospheric cinema in which he captures the gossamer essence of the novel by the simple expedient of a fairly literal transcription. It is the story of the mad, merry Sangers--of Composer Albert Sanger, a genius who has taken love where he found it, and of the five small daughters of his assorted alliances.

Running wild in the wild mountain scenery of the Austrian Tyrol, the Sanger girls are little savages, undisciplined, unschooled. When Composer Sanger (Lyn Harding) dies in the throes of liquor and creation, one of the Sanger girls marries her seducer, the rest are packed off willy-nilly to boarding-school. Tessa, half-child, half-woman, finds studies irksome, runs off to London where lives Lewis Dodd, Bohemian young composer whom she has loved since childhood.

When he sees that she is more woman than child, Dodd realizes he has always loved her. Because he is married they decide on renunciation. When Dodd's socialite wife, who has tried in vain to make him respectable, charges Tessa with unchastity, she collapses from a heart attack. "She said I was your fancy lady," boasts Tessa with childish innocence as Dodd carries her off happily to a little furnished room in Brussels, where she promptly and pathetically expires in his arms.

As the tragic Nymph whose constancy is the most poignant picture of adolescent girlhood since Maedchen in Uniform, British Cinemactress Victoria Hopper gives a tender, sensitive, haunting performance. Dodd is Brian Aherne, the British actor who played Robert Browning to Katharine Cornell's Elizabeth Barrett on the stage. Undistinguished opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Song of Songs, he exhibits in this film vast improvement.

Best shot: Tessa silhouetted against a lighted window in symbolic crucifixion just before she dies.

Gambling Lady (Warner). The heroine of this picture is a talented professional gambler named Lady Lee (Barbara Stanwyck). She plays cards honestly but she always wins. Her social life is even more improbable. When her father dies she refuses, though penniless, to marry a jolly but unscrupulous bookmaker (Pat O'Brien). When she meets a callow socialite named Garry Madison (Joel McCrea), she falls in love with him immediately and marries him soon afterward.

The rest of Gambling Lady shows what happens when an old friend of Garry Madison tries to take him away from his wife. She, Sheila Aiken (Claire Dodd), snubs Lady Lee. Lady Lee renews her acquaintance with the bookmaker. Garry Madison grows jealous. When the bookmaker is found murdered in a gutter, Garry Madison is held for murder. Sheila Aiken, who could have given Garry an alibi by admitting that he was at her house, refuses to do so unless Lady Lee divorces him. This horrid snarl is untangled as simply as it was arranged, by a shot of Madison's uncouth father (C. Aubrey Smith) noticing tears in Lady Lee's eyes when she has said farewell to Garry.

Intrinsically, Gambling Lady is as absurd as it sounds but the honesty of Barbara Stanwyck's performance is as successful as that of the heroine's card playing. Good shot: Lady Lee's amazement when her husband requests her to give back to Sheila Aiken the jewels she has won at vingt-et-un.

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