Newsreel Theatre

The six or seven minutes of newsreel exhibited in ordinary program houses are selected from many reels of current events. Nowhere could one be sure of seeing all the newsreels made in any one week. In Manhattan William Fox, in collaboration with Hearst Metrotone, found what to do with the newsreels discarded weekly by their companies. He took over a Broadway theatre (Embassy) and changed its program from a $2 show twice a day to a continuous 25¢ show. He made the program all newsreels, to run for an hour, a full photographic report of the pictorial parts of the week’s news.

On the first bill was a sound picture, made as an experiment by the Philadelphia Police Department, of a murderer, one William E. Peters, confessing his crime. With a tired, unshaven face and worn, disordered clothes pulled and stretched by fierce handling in the patrol wagon, Peters told slowly about going to his girl’s home, following her upstairs, quarreling with her, shooting her.

You saw Prince Umberto of Italy riding in a Brussels street at the moment when an anti-Fascist took a shot at him (TIME, Nov. 4). You heard the shot, saw the crowd swerve to pounce on the assassin. You saw the young Prince, his face tight as a drum, proceed to lay a wreath on a monument as though nothing had happened.

Lighter events relieved such stern episodes. The Embassy Theatre became so thronged with newsreel patrons that its backers announced they would start a chain of such theatres through the U. S.

The New Pictures

Is Everybody Happy? (Warner). One of the most popular acts of stage orchestras used to consist in the leader telling the audience that he was going to play a classical piece and a jazz piece and asking everybody to show by the way they clapped which one they liked best. A variation of that idea has been arranged for Ted Lewis in the form of some nonsense about an old Hungarian violinist who played symphonies for royal families and his son who played jazz. Elements of mother love, fatherly pride, wealth that can buy finery but not happiness, fail to depress Jazz King Lewis. He excitedly and excitingly blows his clarinet and saxophone, juggles his high hat, croons odd songs in a hoarse voice. Best song: “I’m the Medicine Man for the Blues.”

Ted Lewis was one of jazz’s first jazzbos. He was playing the clarinet crazily in Earl Fuller’s band in Rector’s restaurant, Manhattan, when he began to make money. Until then his antics had always got him into trouble. His father made a good living running the ladies bargain store in Circleville, Ohio. Young Lewis went over to Chillicothe in the street car every night to play in the high school band. Of Hebrew descent, he joined the Episcopal church to sing in the choir next to a girl he liked. He was discharged from Henry Goldsmith’s music store in Columbus because whenever he tried out a clarinet for a customer people thought he had gone crazy. He kept running away from store jobs to work in bands but was usually sent home because he could not play in time. After he left Fuller’s band he made a hit. Lewis enlarged his stage until it included the whole continent. Although he preceded in popularity such current figures as Paul Whiteman and Meyer Davis he has consistently refused to take his profession solemnly. Asked to give a jazz concert in Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, he replied: ”Boloney! Do you want to make me out a jackass?” His orchestra is a well-schooled unit of lively individuals. He was one of the first jazz-producers to practice leaving the orchestral dais and wandering among the dancers while playing. He has played in many a musical comedy, in bigtime vaudeville. The Prince of Wales is his friend. He spends most of his time west of the Alleghenies, earns from $4,000 to $8,000 per week.

Around the World via Graf Zeppelin (Hearst). Mountains, cities, woods, rivers, steppes, cheering crowds. Chicago, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have been photographed from the air hundreds of times. As seen from a window of the Graf Zeppelin they are not any more exciting than they have been in the past. Only a sense of the topical connection of these particular scenes and the unlikelihood that a camera could go around the world in a dirigible without finding anything interesting keeps you watching till the end. Apparently the unlikely has happened. There is a synchronized sound accompaniment, but that was put in at the studio. Best shot: one of the crew crawling out along the hull 3,000 ft. above the Atlantic.

Condemned (Goldwyn). There is hardly a scene in this that is not well photographed and Ronald Coleman and Ann Harding act as well as you would expect. Unfortunately, the charm that the director has taken such pains to put into Condemned is wasted because it is inappropriate. Proper picturization of the grim penal colony on Devil’s Island* calls for another quality than charm. This bleak little story about a criminal who fell in love with the abused wife of the prison warden could have been made credible only by thoughtful, undecorative realism. Best shot: Louis Wolheim, the toughest man on Devil’s Island, exposing a ring of tattoo-marks around his neck, with the legend: “Cut on the dotted line.”

Paris (First National). Irene Bordoni has given about 400 performances of Paris on the stage. Since the director of a picture can retake parts he does not like, Paris as a talking film may be as good as the best performance of the 400. The sound device records satisfactorily one of the few female voices which can render U. S. songs with a French accent and remain bearable. The middle-aged stage comedienne Louise Closser Hale even makes funny the cinema role of a Newton Centre, Mass., matron who loses her inhibitions after one drink of cognac. In spite of occasional blurred color sequences, Paris is about as effective as the photograph of a musical comedy can be. Best shot: Zasu Pitts as a maid.

*Last week La Martiniere, grim prison ship, sailed from La Rochelle, France, to Devil’s Island, French Guiana, most notorious of modern penal settlements, with its semi-annual cargo of convicts (673) locked in iron cages belowdecks. The voyage takes three weeks. Few escape from Devil’s Island; few are releaseduntil Death comes for them .