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Anitra's Dance (M. E. Bute) is five minutes of film in which appears no person, no utilitarian thing. It is an attempt to provoke emotion by the dramatic movements of abstract objects, accompanied by the music of Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. In time to the music, a galaxy of rings swim into view, a pyramid intrudes, something resembling a piano keyboard rolls over & over, 50 balls pass deliberately across the screen. This unhuman cinema is, according to its author, the first entirely abstract film ever made and shown.
Author and producer is Mary Ellen Bute, daughter of a Texas landowner and second cousin of Woodrow Wilson's Colonel Edward Mandell House. After three years' work and 18 unproduced animated cartoons of abstract dramas, she hired a cameraman and made Anitra's Dance in three months for $3,000 in her Manhattan apartment. To get her abstract effects, she used sheets of crumpled Cellophane, an egg-cutter, prisms, toy pyramids, ping pong balls, velvet, sparklers, bracelets and, chiefly, camera angles. Although the pyramids are intended to suggest the fact that Anitra danced in the Egyptian desert, Miss Bute objects to symbolism, claims no connection with surrealism. Says she:
"This is just a kinetic visual art with time continuity. It takes advantage of the possibilities in the cinema of an abstract art that develops in time before the eyes as sound develops before the ears-rhythm, the development of themes in counterpoint, a variety of intensities and volumes. . . ."
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The Painted Veil (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). When Dr. Walter Fane (Herbert Marshall) goes to the door of his wife's bedroom in Hongkong, he finds it locked. On the hall table lies a polo helmet. From these two facts he knows that his Katrin (Greta Garbo) is sinning with a cool young legation attaché (George Brent). At dinner that night, Dr. Fane presents Katrin with a choice: she will leave with him for Mei-tan-fu, where cholera is epidemic, or she will marry the attaché.
At Mei-tan-fu Katrin has time to think about her misdemeanors. While Dr. Fane is busy treating cholera-stricken natives, she sits at home, listening to the babble of her Chinese maid who calls her "Missy" and a cockney resident named Waddington (Forrester Harvey). By the time the doctor has relented so far as to offer to send Katrin back to Hongkong, she has decided to stay in Mei-tan-fu as a nurse. Dr. Fane is wounded in a riot and at the same time the attaché arrives in Mei-tan-fu to see how Katrin is making out. She gives him a short answer and hurries to her husband's sickbed, where they have a reconciliation.
If Mrs. Fane's relations with her husband had remained as they were when she first arrived in Hongkong, hers would have been a loveless and ignoble marriage. Since it is nothing of the sort at the conclusion of The Painted Veil, the picture, despite the fact that Censor Joseph Breen gave it Certificate of Approval No. 395, can be considered an advertisement for adultery as a matrimonial cureall. In this respect it follows Somerset Maugham's shallow novel, from which it was adapted. In other respects, except that it lacks the rapid-fire beginning in which the two lovers see the doorknob turn and wonder whether they have been discovered, The Painted Veil improves on its original.