Cinema: The New Pictures: Jul. 24, 1933

This Is America. In the past five years there have been released in the U. S. more than a dozen travelog and animal films like Goona-Goona, Rango, Douglas Fairbanks' Around the World in 80 Minutes, through all of which ran a story's thread. From Russia have come nonfictional propaganda pictures (Turksib, Ten Days That Shook the World). The War Department and private producers have shown War films (Powder River, The Big Drive), and before that Emanuel Cohen of Pathe News exhibited a three-reeler called Flashes of the Past. Such was the meagre history of the non-fiction film field until last week, when Frederick Ullman Jr., of Pathe and Writer Gilbert Seldes (The Seven Lively Arts) showed This Is America to an enthusiastic audience in Manhattan. This Is America is calculated to help satisfy the public appetite for recent history, lately .revealed and whetted by Author Seldes' The Years of the Locust and Frederick Allen's best-selling Only Yesterday. Cinematically it examines the state of the Union since 1917. These are some of the scenes of the nation's follies and accomplishments in the past 15 years: Front pages screaming WAR. Women knitting, soldiers tramping, Charlie Chaplin selling Liberty Bonds. Swat the Kaiser. Kill the Hun. Ships, ships, ships. "Oh, You Beautiful Doll." The Armistice. The boys come marching home, and the men go marching out of mines and factories suddenly idle. A Paterson police chief, fat and funny, directs his men as they throw women textile workers into a patrol wagon. "Reds" await deportation at Ellis Island. Eugene Debs comes out of jail and Woodrow Wilson sails for the Peace Conference. Henry Cabot Lodge plots destruction for the League of Nations. Three years later, a dying ex-President grins gauntly from the front door of his Washington home. Warren Gamaliel Harding, onetime bandsman of Marion, Ohio, campaigning with a French horn, shakes hands with lodge brothers in pretentious uniforms. The white sheets and the fiery crosses of the Ku Klux Klan. The Harding inauguration. Oil derricks. Albert Bacon Fall. The Harding funeral train. Calvin Coolidge squeezed into a school desk over which his wife presides as schoolmarm. Calvin Coolidge in a cowboy suit, hoeing in a smock. Mah Jong. Marathon dances. Beauty contests. Rum row. Judge Webster Thayer leaving the trial of Sacco & Vanzetti. Automobiles being made. Superfluous automobiles being burned. Tin-can tourists in booming Florida. Women in khaki bloomers. Capt. Lindbergh at Mitchell Field. Gertrude Ederle. Aimee McPherson. A marriage in diving suits. A jazzband playing on the wings of an airplane. Prosperity. Herbert Hoover and Alfred Emanuel Smith. "A chicken in every pot." WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG—Variety. "The year 1931 will offer rewards for investors"— Roger Babson. "Come to the cross of Jesus Christ"—Billy Sunday. Jimmy Walker stealing an apple off a tree. President Hoover's message to the Republican convention. Smoke from the Bonus army's burning huts hanging like a pall over the Capitol. President Roosevelt on the Capitol steps, prepared to "ask extraordinary powers from the Congress." The New Deal. . . .