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Show Girl in Hollywood (First National). The adventures of Joseph Patrick McEvoy's laboriously vivacious heroine are continued in a sequel to Show Girl which is rather duller than its predecessor. Alice White's saucy face and impish dancing tide over long sequences of shoptalk garnished with heavy-handed wit. Best role: Blanche Sweet as a fading beauty of the screen who sings a song to the effect that "there is a tear for every smile in Hollywood."
Old and New (Amkino). To Manhattan last week came Producer Jesse L. Lasky and Director Sergie Michailovitch Eisenstein aboard the Enropa. In Director Eisenstein's pocket was a contract with Paramount-Famous-Lasky Corp. to direct their pictures, use his original art—an art of faces. Instead of finding an actor whose physical equipment, intelligence and training fit him to play a given part, Eisenstein looks for a human being who will be the part, whose performance in front of the camera will not be acting but a continuation of the life which that person lives daily. It is a method which may meet difficulties in Hollywood where, in an actor-population, every successful "type" is inevitably an actor-type; but it is practical in a story like Old and New, dealing with an outstanding phase of Russian life, and taken on location.
Old and New shows the peasants of the steppes first resisting, finally adopting modern agricultural methods in their work. Like all contemporary Russian cinemas, it is dishonest. The victory is won too easily; better times break out like sunlight at the touch of Soviet educators, while the real, secret, breath-taking drama now going on in Russia—the test of a government which has by no means proved its ability to keep faith with its policies—is suppressed. But Old and New is interesting in spite of what it leaves out. It is wonderfully photographed in the flat, wheat-colored daylight of the steppes. Into a poverty in which peasants sleep with roaches running across their faces, and chop their houses in half when a family splits up, and plough, lacking a horse or an ox, with a cow in the traces, the Commune brings mowing machinery and a cream separator. Bold rustic humor finds rich material in the wedding of Fomka, the communal bull, for which the whole village turns out in Sunday clothes. Gathered in front of a barn gate, waiting the entry of Fomka's flower-wreathed bride, the crowd repeats "here she comes" but the first creature to come through the gate is a baby, the second a kitten, finally the bride, to the stirring strains of the "Internationale." Best shot: priests, farmers, woman, and cripples, marching with ikons and incense through the scorched fields, asking God for rain.