New Pictures: Dec. 20, 1926

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The Armored Cruiser Prince Potemkin. In search of Broadway favor came three foreign films last week: Faust (German), Michael Strogoff (French), Potemkin (Russian). Potemkin has been called the supreme achievement in cinema. The scenario follows the simple historical account of mutiny aboard the Imperial Russian cruiser, Prince Potemkin, in the year 1905. It dallies with no hero, no heroine, no plot complication. The drama is of the crew, the human beings who scrub, polish, mother the steel monster and are fed, in return, with wormy meat. They protest. A sail cloth is thrown over 50 sailors, marines are ordered to shoot them down. With one accord, all the men rebel, fling the officers overboard, commandeer the ship, receive food and sympathy from the harbor town of Odessa, steam past the rest of the fleet (whose crews refuse to fire on their comrades), find temporary refuge in Rumania.

The artistic merit of the picture lies in its ability to make an ungarnished section of humanity glow with a composite heroism. Rhythm seems to be the secret of its intensity.

A curious thing about Potemkin is that Director S. M. Eisenstein, striving religiously to make his film the drama of a group, almost permits one character to emerge as hero. Such an effect would have ruined the general scheme, yet so keenly does the need for individual enterprise make itself felt, in even a glorified crowd, that the proletarian artist must give it at least grudging recognition.

Faust (Emil Jannings). The German film, by Ufa, creator of The Last Laugh, Siegfried, Variety, achieves a triumph in photographic fantasy. From the ever-serviceable Faust story is derived a weird fairytale, a picture story of the powers of evil on earth. Through it all goes Emil Jannings, a not particularly impressive Devil, making funny faces, playing mean pranks, raising hell. In the end, however, he loses his wager with the Lord's archangel, for Faust regained a soul by dying at the side of Marguerite with LOVE in his heart. A story not without significance, but florid rather than profound. The excellence of the film lies in its beauty, its brilliant visualization of fantasy.

Michael Strogoff. The French film impresses one as being very like The Perils Of Pauline telescoped into one sitting (in Siberia) and inverted into the masculine gender. The hero, as told in Jules Verne's novel, is solemnly commissioned by the Tsar Alexander to take a message from Moscow to the Grand Duke in Irkutsk. After encountering the Tartar hordes single-handed for no good reason, Mike arrives in time to kill the archvillain with his bare hands. The motivation puerile, the photography clumsy, it has, however, some good horse-backing.