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masterpiece, which Thunder Over Mexico is not. Excitable Editor Lincoln
Kirstein of Hound & Horn last week got himself ejected from a
Manhattan preview of Thunder Over Mexico for trying to voice his
objections to the picture, for giving members of the audience handbills
denouncing Upton Sinclair. Said Upton Sinclair, when he arrived in
Manhattan for last week's premiere: "If these fellows go on making
a disturbance, we'll get our money back." In Moscow, Sergei
Eisenstein last week let it be known that he was at work on a cinema history
of Moscow's last 500 years. S« O— S— Iceberg (Universal). From the
comfortable bivouac of his polar expedition on the crest of an Arctic
skiing slope, Dr. Lawrence (Rod La Rocque) pushes off alone on the
track of another expedition lost some years before. His four companions
set off to find him, promptly lose their food. They try to cross a
frozen fiord to an Eskimo village. When the ice breaks, they take
refuge on a berg. There, nestling in a cave, is Lawrence. As the
iceberg floats along, its population increases. First a rescue plane
containing Lawrence's wife (Leni Riefenstahl, an obscure but nervy
German actress) arrives, gets wrecked landing. Then appear two polar
bears and a dead seal. It begins to look as though straps will have to
be attached to the iceberg for its passengers to hang on when finally
one of the expedition jumps off to swim ashore. A second rescue plane
picks him up, takes him to an Eskimo village whose obliging denizens
paddle out to the berg in kayaks, ferry the Lawrences back to land. In
adventure films of this type, the story is important only as a means of
introducing acts of God. The berg-breakings, crevasse-creakings,
storms and deaths in S. O. S. Iceberg are sufficiently authentic to be
a deterrent to polar exploration, an inducement to emotional
chilblains. Made under Director Tay Garnett, by a company that spent
a year on location near the coast of Greenland, it is a refrigerated
horror story, the more effective because its patterns of ice and sea
have an enormous nightmare beauty. The picture would have been better
if it had showed
more plainly what the explorers ate and what they wore beneath their fur
tippets. Good shot: a husky dog slipping into a crevasse and dangling
there by his harness until he pulls the rest of the team and then the
sled in after him.
My Weakness (Fox-De Sylva). As a vehicle for Lilian Harvey, pert British
comedienne who made a U. S. reputation playing in German musicomedies
like Congress Dances, this picture has the virtue of being as
unpretentious as it is slight. It requires her only to impersonate a
stock character: the scullery maid who is metamorphosed into a lady
by the attractive young man who has bet his crusty uncle a fortune that
he can marry her to a millionaire.
Frail, soft-eyed, graceful and demurely impudent, Miss Harvey gives her
role a pleasant, silvery freshness, makes her eventual betrothal to the
attractive young man (Lew Ayres) instead of the millionaire (Charles
Butterworth) seem satisfactory as well as inevitable. She ably
conceals the embarrassment she must have felt for the lyric of a pretty
tune called "Gather Lip Rouge While You May." Funniest shot:
Butterworth, defeated in love, trying to commit suicide by insulting a gangster.
