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Thunder Over Mexico (Upton Sinclair) is a feature length null picture whittled out of the gigantic 243,000-ft. opus which Director Sergei Michailovitch Eisenstein made in Mexico over two years ago. In silent form with a musical accompaniment, it investigates a minor miscarriage of social justice on a Mexican hacienda toward the end of the last century. A peon and his fiancee go to their ranch owner for permission to marry. One of the hacendado's guests rapes the girl. The peon strikes her assaulter, then tries with four friends to retrieve the girl from a tower into which she has been tossed. They fail and scamper away, pursued by a posse which includes the hacendado's daughter, who gets shot dead when the posse catches up with the fugitives. The three fugitives who are captured are disposed of by the "horse torture." Servants bury them alive so that only their heads show above ground, then ride over them till they are mashed to death. This wild chronicle—a combination of radical propaganda and old-fashioned "Western"—starts with shots of Aztec ruins, ends with shots of an idealized modern Mexico, symbolized by Mexico City University students in their football suits. It would be undistinguished were it not for the fact that the photography—for which Director Eisenstein and his Camera Man Edouard Tisse were equally responsible—is superb. Critics, esthetes and Socialist Upton Sinclair, who was last week out for Governor of California on a Democratic ticket, have been babbling about Eisenstein's Mexican picture for the last two and one-half years. Since this excerpt from it, which the producers expect to follow with two more feature length pictures and a series of short travelogs, is unsatisfactory, the future of Eisenstein's monster is likely to be as controversial as its past. In 1931 Paramount hired Director Eisenstein, whose Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World were probably the best pre-talkie Russian cinemas to go to Hollywood. He worked for three months on An American Tragedy, was then re moved because he was "too unusual." Upton Sinclair and some of his friends put up $100,000, sent Eisenstein to Mexico where he had in mind an ambitious work to interpret the history, character and appearance of the Mexican people. When Eisenstein finished shooting his Que Viva Mexico! he sent it to Upton Sinclair, went back to Russia. U. S. directors, working with high-salaried actors, cannot afford to use much more film than they plan to have in the finished picture. Russian directors, particularly Eisenstein, are much more likely to choose casts of completely untrained actors, like the Mexican peons whom Eisenstein hired at laborers' pay. They can then afford to use film extravagantly. Assembling and cutting are far more important to Director Eisenstein than to his Hollywood confreres. When Eisenstein returned to Russia without finishing Que Viva Mexico! Upton Sinclair sold the distribution rights to Hollywood Producer Sol Lesser. Controversies started as soon as Producer Lesser revealed his plan for cutting Que Viva Mexico! Upton Sinclair insisted that the cutting followed Eisenstein's original scenario. Critics who had talked to Eisenstein about the picture accused Sinclair of "butchering" the film. They insisted that Eisenstein's original 243,000 ft. contained the material for a cinematic