Cinema: The New Pictures Feb. 10, 1930

Seven Days Leave (Paramount). The only change besides the title which the producers have made in Sir James Barrie’s The Old Lady Shows Her Medals is the suggestion that the gaunt soldier whom a scrubwoman pretends is her son and takes pride in as a hero, was really an unpatriotic realist who planned to desert his regiment as soon as he got to London on leave. It is just enough of a change to key the story up to cinema requirements without destroying any of its tenderness. Because she felt embarrassed when other scrub-women boasted of their fighting sons, old Mrs. Dowey (Beryl Mercer) picked out a Black Watch private (Gary Cooper) who happened to have her own name. She told people she was his mother, sent him cakes and sweaters, making him believe they came from some fine lady. When he came to scold her for her pretensions she won him over so effectively that he gave up his idea of deserting. Seven Days Leave is wonderfully cast and acted, directed with able comprehension by Richard Wallace. Best shot: the big Canadian taking his adopted mother to the dance floor of the Imperial Restaurant.

Gary Cooper was born in Helena, Mont., but went to grammar school in England. When he was 13 he went back to Helena, attended high school there. One night he was smashed up in an automobile accident and for two years after that his father made him stay on the family ranch. When he got out of Grinnell College he drew cartoons for a Helena newspaper. He went to Los Angeles to be a commercial artist, began to hang around the offices of casting directors. He got parts in a few westerns and after a while his height and his handsome, inexpressive face induced directors to let him try straight roles. Some of his good ones: Beau Sabreur, The Legion of the Condemned, The Shopworn Angel, Wolf Song.

Fragment of an Empire (Amkino). No picture has more intelligently shown the connection between the War and the new era in Russia than this story of how a shell-shocked soldier reclaims his life. Bearded Fedor Nikitin as Sergeant Filimonov loses his memory for four years and gets it back when he sees his wife’s face at a train window. In a moment of anguish everything he had forgotten floods through his mind. He leaves the country station where he has been doing odd jobs, goes back to Moscow to take up life again. More than half the picture deals with his efforts to understand the new times. Fragment of an Empire is a description of a tremendous inspiration created out of horror, vivid and affecting because its theatre is personal. The hope and the horror, since they are not separated by the consciousness of what has happened in between, make a new man of him.

The photography itself is like an intelligence greater than the sum of the minds that worked to make it. Whatever is seen through the camera has the novelty, strength and directness that the same images might have as they flowed in the thought-stream, rapid and silent, of some vigorous, original mind. Best shot: the War in Filimonov’s tortured memory symbolized as a vision of himself as a Russian soldier, meeting and recognizing himself at an intersection of searchlights as a German soldier; then his own image again, as captain of a battery, receiving and executing the order that blows both other images into eternity.