The Big Pond (Paramount). This is another film that has been tailored—far less elaborately than The Love Parade—to the measure of Maurice Chevalier. It is successful because of Chevalier's ability to convince his audiences that he enjoys what he is doing and because of his superb skill at singing the "intimate" type of revue ballad. The story is about a Frenchman who makes his mark in the chewing-gum business so as to win a U. S. millionaire's daughter—Claudette Colbert. With the plot keyed a little lower and a chorus thrown in The Big Pond could easily have been turned into a musical comedy. As it stands it is good program entertainment, but not adequate for Chevalier's talents. Best song: "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me."
The Divorcee (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Whether the success of Ex-Wife, the novel from which this picture is adapted, was due to its frankness on sex, or to a certain distinct and half-naive pathos in its sophisticated affectations, will make little difference to people who see The Divorcee. The film accurately reproduces all the qualities of the book, including its disorder and its occasional approach to burlesque, but Norma Shearer's beauty makes it worth watching in spite of mediocre dialog. It concerns a young couple whose happiness was disrupted because they had a habit of confessing their in fidelities to each other and who were re united only after the wife had had a lively succession of affairs with men of various nationalities. Its interpretation of an elastic moral standard, toned down to conventional cinematic metaphors, will have a less disturbing effect on young people than settings which create the idea that Manhattan newspapermen and women live in gaudy luxury and have little to do beyond gratifying their amatory whims. Best shot: an automobile accident which has little to do with the story.
The Silent Enemy (Burden-Chanler). Every schoolboy knows that the Indian has not yet quite vanished from the forests of the continent that was his. But no schoolbook, museum or government bureau will ever preserve the vestigial red man as this picture does. Few professionals could have made such a picture, nor could they quite destroy it with commercial cutting and retouching after the effort and money lavished upon it by courageous amateurs. It is the work of William Douglas Burden and William C. Chanler, a young Harvard combination. From boyhood Burden has known the forests of Canada. The cast was recruited from the Ojibwas of upper Ontario, with old Chief Yellow Robe of the Sioux, who three years ago inducted Chief White Eagle Coolidge into that tribe, and who this spring died a city death of pneumonia (TIME, April 21), Princess Spotted Elk of the Penobscots, and young Chief Long Lance of the Blackfoot tribe, author, boxer, wrestler and onetime West Pointer, to play the leads. Burden and Chanler spent ten months on wilderness location to obtain a realism so striking that Paramount, which released The Silent Enemy last week, complained: "People will never believe it." Accordingly, a six-hour epic has been cut to 90 minutes. But it is still epic.