Cinema: The New Pictures: Nov. 11, 1940

North West Mounted Police (Paramount) is a movie in the grand style—God’s own biggest trees and mountains for props and backdrops; stanch courage and lofty aims among the good people; cunning and treachery lurking within the sinister forces; the ominous note of doom finally stifled by the fortitude of noble men.

Its dialog is as seasoned as the film’s producer, Cecil B. DeMille, who was turning out its jerky ancestors in 1913. Veteran cinemaddicts will not be fooled into forgetting its parentage by either sound or Technicolor when they hear the half-breed Louvette (Paulette Goddard) woo the heroine’s wayward brother (Robert Preston) with such primitive verbal caresses as: “I eat your heart out,” or “My heart seeng lack a bird.” When the shy Texas Ranger (Gary Cooper) casually rides his cayuse right into the heart of a pack of trouble in the north woods, the blonde heroine (Madeleine Carroll) tells him, “Texas must be heaven.” “It will be,” says he, “when you get there.” Climax both of plot and of corny dialog arrives as the small outpost of Mounties, cut to ribbons by a ruthless attack of the Indians and half-breeds, hears the bugle of the approaching reinforcements. Lynne Overman, a Scotsman, ambushed with the struggling men, barks: “That will be Col.

Irvine’s relief column!” Solemn-faced Producer DeMille, who works himself into the proper mood by donning such lavish haberdashery as forest-green gabardine riding costumes, bows to no stickler for technical accuracy. A thousand volumes were probed in research for North West Mounted Police. A “mounty” was imported to drill a squadron of extras. A forest of 400 pine trees, requiring a State fire warden, converted six acres of the Paramount lot into rugged backwoods. This earnest devotion to accuracy left little time for comedy, suspense and other standbys of good swashbuckling melodrama.

Mayerling to Sarajevo (Leo Films) is 8,100 feet of celluloid whose recent peregrinations have been as exciting as any it could possibly put on the screen. Completed in February 1940, it lay idle in studio vaults, then opened in Brussels three weeks before the Nazis appeared. They quickly burned all prints but one because of its sympathetic treatment of the Habsburgs. In mid-May it began a Paris run, lasted until the Nazi occupation 26 days later when again the prints were burned. The one unburned Brussels print was smuggled to England, flown to Canada and fashionably released last fortnight at Manhattan’s arty Little Carnegie Playhouse, with proceeds from the $5 (and up) tickets earmarked for Bundles for Britain.

Unreeled, Mayerling to Sarajevo retells, sometimes haltingly but always compassionately, the heckled romance of Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge), heir to Franz Josef’s Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feuillere), his morganatic Czech wife. Its numerous revelations of Austrian pre-war court life, quite familiar now to fans long exposed to the Viennese nobility, seem new only in a simpler, more personalized view of Franz Josef (Jean Worms), the scheming Prince Montenuovo (Aime Clariond) and other appendages of the state and social hierarchy. But historically, the film—a logical sequel to 1937’s teary, highly successful Mayerling—submits the suggestion that Franz Ferdinand’s and Sophie’s double assassination at Sarajevo was more than the accidental success of a Bosnian anarchist; that Austrian ministers, frightened by the Archduke’s democratic leanings, purposely led him into the death trap.

Justified or not, the conclusions are convincing. Director Ophuls injects his picture with an air of authenticity by occasionally weaving in remarkable newsreel shots of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in action—its soldiers, palaces, pomp. The death ride at Sarajevo (TIME, July 3, 1939), vividly reconstructed, includes such precise detail as the abortive attempt at assassination during the parade to the City Hall, the Archduke’s angry retorts to the Mayor’s friendly welcome, the confusion over changing the return route of the parade.

Of more than usual interest to U. S. audiences is the appearance of John Lodge. Grandson of Massachusetts’ famed isolationist Senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, brother of its current, handsome Senator of the same name, Lodge is a former Harvardman and Manhattan lawyer with a brief, obscure Hollywood movie career.

Five years ago he emigrated to European film studios, where he has throbbed feminine hearts in English, French and Italian pictures. Biggest asset of Cinemactor Lodge is his perfect mastery of these tongues. Says he: “We think it is cute here to have an accent, but not the French.” Too Many Girls (RKO Radio) is Broadway Producer-Director George Abbott’s faithful reconstruction of his gay stage hit of last season about football and females in a Southwestern college. With the pace of a jack rabbit it bounds from song to dance to comedy to song, offers too short glimpses of some of Hollywood’s abler and less familiar talent.

Amiably burlesquing the academic tradition, George Marion’s book peoples cow-town Pottawatomie (“You made a lot o’ me”) College with a happy group of collegians whose principal credentials are their aptitude with a funny line or a catchy Rodgers & Hart tune. Summa cum laude in voice is Radio Songstress Frances Langford, crooning Love Never Went to College with feeling. Doe-eyed Lucille Ball gets choicer material in the well-worn I Didn’t Know What Time It Was and the new You’re Nearer, also gets the affections of Richard Carlson, whose crew haircut makes him the first genuine-looking Princeton undergraduate in cinema history. Ann Miller, Hal LeRoy and a Cuban, Desi Arnaz, a terpsichorean Rudolph Valentino who was in the stage show, make you wish there were more time for dancing; Eddie Bracken that there were more for comedy.