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Beyond Victory (RKO Pathé). The spirit of a masterpiece can be reflected more easily than its technique and it is the spirit of All Quiet on the Western Front that animates this little war story. Three years ago war would have been glorified in such a piece of cinema trade-goods as this, even if it were glorified only as a background for heroic actions; now war is presented simply to be pilloried. The framework—four men assigned to hold the enemy in a beleaguered post while the main body of troops retires—has possibilities. Each man, faced with almost certain death, tells how he came to go to war. But things get started too slowly. Several dozen U.S. flags, tons of dynamite, miles of barbed wire, thousands of tin hats, intended to galvanize the horror into realistic terms, merely become constituents as familiar and therefore as unnoticeable as the advertisements for grain and hardware, on the backdrops of rural vaudeville houses. Best sequences: James Gleason, henpecked husband of a knife-thrower, telling why he went to war.
Cracked Nuts (Radio). This is a nonsense comedy of which the humor, if any, depends on seeing Edna May Oliver, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey go through their routines on the same set. The plot is a contest between Wheeler and Woolsey for the mythical kingdom of Eldorania which Woolsey believes he owns because he won it in a crap game with a former ruler, and which Wheeler claims because he bought an Eldoranian revolution for $100,000. Unfortunately such gags as the long dialog in which the word "well," used as an interjection, is dragged through every possible shade of meaning, and the scene where Wheeler and Woolsey come through an airplane bombing with most of their clothes torn off, were not good even when they were new.
A Connecticut Yankee (Fox). Mark Twain's story was made into an effective farce in silent cinema days, starring Harry Myers; then it became a successful musi-comedy. But not until its present metamorphosis into a talking picture has a form been reached in which the many-faceted material is properly displayed. Few creative works are translatable from one medium to another, but A Connecticut Yankee is no less trenchant as a picture than as a novel; it is wonderful entertainment, rippling with chuckles, expanding often into resonant Twainian belly-laughs. Director David Butler has omitted the sociological satire of the novel. He has concentrated on the humor of anachronism and made a thorough job of it. His method is not subtle, but the book is not either, and the picture is just as funny as the book.
The old outline has been preserved: the Yankee finds his dream is real, he is at the Court of the Round Table, and he amazes King Arthur by causing the sun to become dark on the day he is to be executed, a feat which he announces after consulting his pocket almanac. The Yankee organizes factories in which modern appliances are turned out for the use of medieval people and sends the knights out riding with sandwich boards slung over their armor advertising corn cure, liver pills. fountain pens.