Cinema: The New Pictures Aug. 25, 1930

Moby Dick (Warner). Like The Sea Beast, the silent version of Herman Melville’s story in which Barrymore appeared four years ago, this is a true moving picture, no less effective because a conventional love-interest has been added to the activities of a crazy one-legged sea-captain who wanted to get even with a whale. Across tremendous horizons the camera’s eye wheels after the tiny whaling boat chasing a corporate phantom of monstrous, inhuman evil. All the work that a camera can do with great spaces and wild things is done, pictorially, as it should be. This Moby Dick is not a masterpiece. The concentration of the novel, the pressure of a mania growing until it makes the whale itself a Lilliputian thing, a mental cosine, is not managed, but Barrymore again makes a living character of Ahab. Triumphantly drunk, he swaggers through the wharfside brothels of the whaling town. There is a scene in which the stump of his bitten leg is seared with a hot iron and a closeup of him finally cutting his vengeance out of the whale that took the leg. Other great shots: the shanghaied crew of murderers; enlarged projections of the whaler under full sail in a choppy sea, wild-eyed Ahab battling a storm. The shot of the amputation was included, somewhat differently, in The Sea Beast, but the whole picture is new, entirely reconstructed and rephotographed.

Love in the Ring (Terra-Ton). Max Schmeling made this picture while he was at home in Germany last year, several months before he won the world’s heavyweight championship on a foul from Jack Sharkey in Manhattan (TiME, June 23). One does not have to understand German to follow the occasional dialog sequences, so simple is the story of a fighter momentarily distracted from his boyhood sweetheart by the wiles of attractive Olga Tschechowa. Fighter Schmeling, composed and earnest, is helped through his scenes by considerate direction; he is more convincing when amorous than during a tedious fight with a gargantuan opponent in which both cock their punches for the camera. The stage fights of one-time Champion Jack Dempsey, experienced vaudevillian and actor, with Estelle Taylor Dempsey, in the Manhattan play The Big Fight, were more realistic than this picture, but Dempsey acted on the whole more self-consciously than Schmeling. Well-read, interested in painting, the German takes seriously this chance at artistic expression and holds his end up well in a better cast than ever set off Dempsey’s productions. Best sequences: introducing the amicable, beer-garden domesticity that is the background of German boxing.

Eyes of the World (United Artists). Transcription of a novel by Harold Bell Wright, this cinema is a compound of a half-dozen violently familiar melodramas. Among the complications moves an unhappy woman who always wears a black veil and who in the end turns out to be the long-lost mother of one of the characters. There is also an unscrupulous society woman, her evil brother, and a country girl whom an artist from the East finds bathing at dawn in a mountain pool. Blond Una Merkel takes the part of this young girl. That her good looks and slow, intense voice will make her important before long is the only interesting suggestion conveyed by the whole silly business. Typical Wright phraseology: “vipers” (for villains), “little minx” (for heroine), “ablution” (for bath).

Queen High (Paramount). Although this was a successful Broadway musical show four years ago even such talented entertainers as Charles Ruggles and Frank Morgan can hardly make a fair program picture out of it in its present form. The trouble is that the plot has been padded with pointless routine fooling and the old songs replaced with poorer though newer ones, badly sung. It still, however, contains that fine scene in which two partners in a tottering garter business draw a poker hand to decide which shall serve as the other’s butler for a year.

Recaptured Love (Warner). Dedicated to the proposition that there is no fool like an old fool, this shows how a clever wife handles an aging husband’s infatuation with a younger woman. No new twist is given the theatrical stencil except the inept title which, proclaiming the denouement, effectively checkmates suspense. On the stage it was Misdeal, a play by Basil Woon. Belle Bennett and John Halliday are in it. Best sequence: Miss Bennett teasing the husband who wants to come home.