The Dark Angel (Samuel Goldwyn) is a literate and tastefully arranged version of the celebrated sob-cinema in which Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman committed assault & battery on the emotions of the U. S. public in 1925. It is notable for the fine acting of its three attractive principals, a superior screen script and a climax which deserves a place on that roll of honor and profit which includes such classics as the life-preserver sequence in Cavalcade, the dance of the coffee rolls in The Gold Rush, the heroine's suicide in Anna Karenina.
Alan Trent (Fredric March), Kitty Vane (Merle Oberon) and Gerald Shannon (Herbert Marshall) grow up together in England in time to have their already complicated emotional patterns tangled further by the War. Alan and Kitty love each other. Gerald also loves Kitty. Consequently, when he suspects Alan of spending a night in less fastidiously chosen company just before they sail for France, he goes into a rage. The result of this "out there" is a dangerous assignment for Alan, from which he fails to return. When Gerald gets back to England, he learns that the girl with whom Alan spent the night was no ordinary wench but Kitty, in person, being gallantly informal. On the basis of remorse for this misunderstanding, Kitty and Gerald, both believing Alan dead, prepare to marry.
Alan has not been killed at the front, only blinded. Believing that this will make his life a burden rather than a joy to Kitty, he does not return to her. Instead, under an assumed name, he takes to writing juveniles, attended only by a secretary (Frieda Inescort) and his friend Sir George Barton (John Halliday). On the eve of their marriage, Kitty and Gerald learn of his existence. Still hell-bent on self-sacrifice, Alan arranges the furniture in the living room, hides his Braille books, awaits their call. When they arrive, he greets them soberly, pours a drink for each and, grimly pretending that he sees her perfectly, explains to Kitty that he no longer loves her. The great moment then arrives. '"Goodby," says Kitty, holding out her hand. Alan does not take it. Gerald, watching from the doorway, guesses why.
Peasants (Lenfilm) is the sequel to Chapayev and The Youth of Maxim in the cinema trilogy which won first prize at Moscow's Cinema Festival last spring. Like Chapayev, which dealt with an incident in the early days of the Russian Revolution, and The Youth of Maxim, which was concerned with the first serious labor disturbances in Tsarist factories, Peasants takes collective farming as its theme, consciously makes of it an advertisement rather than a drama. Like its two predecessors, however, it is an advertisement so forcefully constructed and so intelligently presented, that, even for U. S. audiences who cannot understand the issues involved and would be unsympathetic if they could, it almost amounts to entertainment.