Cinema: The New Pictures: Apr. 18, 1938

The Overland Express (Coronet-Columbia). One April day 78 years ago two crack horsemen set out lickety-split, one from Sacramento, Calif., the other from St. Joseph, Mo., to inaugurate the Pony Express and start a legend that is still galloping. Last week, while towns along the oldtime route were restoring some of the legendary landmarks, cinema’s hardest-riding Western star, resolute, weather-beaten Buck Jones, was blazing the trail again for the younger generation. Pledged to abstain from profanity and hard liquor, Buck and his heck-for-leather pony riders yippee forth on their foam-flecked ponies, carry the mail on schedule though redskins and mustachioed villains do their durndest to bar the way. As memorable history, The Overland Express beats schoolbooks hollow.

When William S. Hart, aging patriarch of the Westerns, slid wearily from the saddle more than a decade ago, Buck Jones (real name: Charles Gebhart) already had a leg up on his larruping, law-&-order cinema career. Still riding like a Centaur after 20 years in pictures, 6-foot, 175-pound, 48-year-old Buck Jones roams a wider cinema range than did Bill Hart, sometimes puffs breakfast cereals over the radio. Last year Buck Jones earned as much as $7,500 a week, took in about $300,000 all told. Whenever a Buck Jones picture goes out, it has an audience of 3,500,000 youngsters waiting for it— cinema’s biggest fan club, the Buck Jones Rangers. They proudly wear badges, shrill the praises of Buck and his 25-year-old horse, Silver, from Maine to Hawaii.

There’s Always a Woman (Columbia) builds up around rambunctious, banjo-eyed Joan Blondell a strong case for more blondes in the detective business. Skidding along on her intuition through a mystery that has as much mirth as murder, Private Detective Blondell bumps pertly from clue to clue, lands on the solution while the police and her sleuthing cinema husband (Melvyn Douglas) are still fumbling around.

Following the lead of The Thin Man (TIME, July 9, 1934), There’s Always a Woman puts on a cheerful but exciting air of informality by making crime detection safe for the younger married set, plays prankish variations on the traditional theme that the police (Scotland Yard excepted) are always baffled. Best scene: Detective Blondell undergoing a third degree at the hands of her worsted cop competitors, ending up a fresh & dewy pink in a roomful of wilted bluecoats.

Lenin in October (Amkino). For over a year U. S. Stalinists have been noisily picketing the film Tsar to Lenin (TIME, March 22, 1937), prepared by Trotskyist Author Max Eastman from newsreels and film records of the Russian revolution. Reason: the reels showed Old Bolshevik Leon Trotsky as the busiest and best aide, discovered Stalin in but one group shot, standing obscurely to Lenin’s left in a bad light.

Last fortnight the Soviet film industry released its official answer in the U. S. An arresting character study of Nikolai Lenin during the last days of the Provisional Kerensky Government Lenin in October went far out of its way (but never off the present “party line”) to convince U. S. cinemaudiences that Stalin was Lenin’s fair-haired boy, that Lenin trusted him much more than he did “idiotic” pessimists like Trotsky, “traitors” like Leo Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev. With youthful, black-browed Stalin standing stolidly at his right, puffing on a Hawkshaw pipe, Lenin (Boris V. Shchukin) addresses his colleagues. “Stalin is right,” he barks, “there must be immediate seizure of power.” Throughout the film Stalin is shown frequently, studying maps, arranging for Lenin’s safety, an importantly busy factotum in the revolution headquarters in Smolny Institute. Trotsky never once appears, although a character devised to resemble him skulks with the counter-revolutionists.

The revolution period has been the Soviet cinema’s favorite topic, but it has never before presumed to characterize its now-deified hero. Actor Shchukin’s profile is Lenin’s to the eyelash. From biographies, letters, newsreels and associates of Lenin he got Lenin’s impatient, nervously-energetic demeanor down pat. In the film he thumbs his vest, shifts uneasily whenever he has to stay seated, drives his points home with emphatic coordination of forefinger, whiskers and narrowed eyes. Not so free with his gestures is the unnamed player who portrays Stalin. Like the actor who played the king as if someone were about to play the ace, his portrayal is so chary it makes the Soviet iron man seem wooden.