Cinema: The New Pictures Sep. 8, 1930

Abraham Lincoln (United Artists). This is not a drama about Lincoln nor a portrait of him but a biographical sketch made of rapid, isolated sequences from his life. The approach is conventional, almost school-bookishly historical. In the producers’ effort, often successful, to make a recognizable human being from the cryptic figure of Lincolnian anecdote, the audience is never allowed to forget that this human being was also the Savior of the Union. It is not the approach an artist would take; in taking it Director David Wark (Birth of a Nation) Griffith was thinking first of the boxoffice. And since there is nothing in public life today remotely approaching the Lincoln legend, .perhaps Director Griffith’s judgment was as good from the patriotic as from the financial point of view. Moreover, perhaps the schoolbook Lincoln is essentially the great Lincoln.

First important picture made in six years by Director Griffith, its old-fashioned technique is surprising at first, until you begin to feel it appropriate to the subject in hand. Often the transition from one crisis in Lincoln’s career to another is so abrupt as to seem superficial. In part this is because of the limitations which program-time impose on the film’s structure (it lasts only 100 minutes). The dialog by Poet Stephen Vincent Benet is less a factor in the picture’s success than the masterly acting of Walter Huston in the title role. Sometimes in appearance he is a double for the familiar pictures of Lincoln—; sometimes, particularly in the earlier scenes as the backwoods lawyer without the beard and the weary dignity that characterized the President, one could not tell who he was meant to be if subordinate persons did not constantly (almost too often) call him Abe. At all times however, his acting proves that he has thought out the part and made every gesture and intonation consistent with his conception of it. Ian Keith, as the half-mad, half-drunk actor-assassin, John Wilkes Booth, is as macabre and satanic as a character by Edgar Allan Poe; General Grant (E. Alyn Warren) is good too. Disappointments are the too-pious Robert E. Lee and too-coy Una Merkel as Ann Rutledge.

Good shots: Lincoln dancing with his future wife at a party where Stephen Arnold Douglas is the leading stag; Lincoln called home to supper by his children just as he is receiving the presidential nomination in his Springfield law-office; Lincoln telling his cabinet he is going to take Fort Sumter; Lincoln walking in the White House halls in his stocking feet because he has insomnia; a long line of telegraphers getting despatches from the fighting line; General Philip Henry Sheridan and his staff in their wild gallop to reorganize their broken army cutting, in a flash of steel and a streamer of dust, across the corner of a cornfield; the assassination.

“I never made a picture because I was interested in History. I wanted to do something more important than I have done in the past. Lincoln is a great man. I thought he would make a fascinating subject.” So last week said David Vark Griffith, who nevertheless has often taken a not purely cinematic interest in history. Son of Civil War Brig.-General Jacob Wark Griffith (known in La Grange, Ky. as “Roarin’ Jake”), he made his greatest picture, The Birth of a Nation to show how the South had felt about the Civil War. It cost $110,000 to make and yielded a gross of $19,000,000 of which he is reputed to have received 10%(. During the World War he made a propaganda picture for the Allies (Hearts of the World), sometimes working under fire. From Intolerance which he directed in 1916 to his first picture for United Artists in 1920 (he was one of the founders of this company) he did not do much. After Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924), he made occasional program features. His last was Lady of the Pavements with Lupe Velez (TIME, March 18, 1929). He spends his money rapidly and moodily. United Artists let him take as much time off as he wants between pictures, give him free rein as to expenses, within reason.

Animal Crackers (Paramount). Groucho is the one with the pointed mustache and glasses who pulls most of the wisecracks. Harpo is the one in the curled peruke whose zany glee is never accompanied by a syllable. Chico is the tough one. Zeppo is handsome and does little. They are the Marxes, the funniest brothers in the U. S. In this adaptation of their musicomedy, a better piece than their first talkie (The Cocoanuts), the plot about a stolen painting is brought scornfully to light once in a while, and then merely as though to prove that they had a plot to ignore. Romantic songs and parades of young women are reduced to a minimum. For an hour and a half the Marx brothers air their family humor, a crazy jumble of satiric irrelevancies which sound like nothing when written or quoted but which make audiences rock with the kind of laughter that pours over every minute or two in a wild burst and between the bursts trickles on its own momentum. Typical shots: Harpo playing the harp; a closeup of Chico’s fingers on the piano; Groucho’s parody of business dictation; Groucho’s song, “Hello, I Must Be Going.”

Monte Carlo (Paramount). This is a brilliant example of the only authentic dramatic form originated by the talking cinema. Like The Love Parade, it is hard to say whether it is a light, sophisticated story form in which music has been woven, or a musicomedy deftly founded on a legitimate plot. Jeanette MacDonald and Jack Buchanan play it charmingly, but it remains a director’s picture. Into most of its shots, Ernst Lubitsch has thoroughly infused the photographic wit that has made him famous as the cinema’s suavest interpreter of boudoir drama. On a train going to Monte Carlo Miss MacDonald, as an impoverished countess, sings the first song of the piece; as syncopated accompaniment the director has worked in orchestral wheel clanks, train whistles, brakes and other traveling noises. Later, after the slender fable of a Count who pretends to be a hairdresser for amorous reasons, has been traced through most of its variations, Lubitsch brings in as denouement an act from the musical version of Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire. Monte Carlo is not always sparkling, but it is far above the average film entertainment. Best minor role: Zasu Pitts as a maid. Best songs: “Give Me a Moment, Please” and “Always in All Ways.”

*There are actors who look more like Lincoln than Huston. Last week Charles Edward Bull, famed for his portrayals of the President, strode onto the stage at a play given at a G. A. R. encampment near Cincinnati. In the audience a man fainted. It was Steven G. Weaver, 87, who 65 years ago in his blue uniform stood guard in the White House over the body of Lincoln. “I never in my life saw. . . . My God, I thought it was …” gasped Weaver as old comrades revived him.