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After making The Yellow Ticket in Moscow, she went to Berlin, played the lead in Terra Film's production of The Brothers Karamazov. Then she made a French version of the same picture in two weeks. Her first performance in The Brothers Karamazov prompted Samuel Goldwyn to offer her a contract. When she arrived in the U. S. in April 1932, with her architect husband Dr. Eugene Franke, Anna Sten was subjected to intensive "Americanization" by Producer Goldwyn. She got $1,500 a week for doing practically nothing. She had U. S. tutors, servants, clothes, car & friends. She was not permitted to speak to newshawks lest "flaws" show in her behavior. After one year of grooming, Anna Sten was considered sufficiently "American" to perform as a Parisian demimondaine.
She now lives at Santa Monica in a many-windowed modern house designed by her husband, drives home every day in her 1933 black Ford coupe for a lunch of borsch, shashlik & cognac. Her next role will be (Katusha) in Resurrection.
Beloved (Universal) is the lachrymose life history of Carl Hausmann (John Boles). At ten he is a Viennese violin virtuoso. At 20 he is a music teacher in Charleston, S. C. in love with one of his pupils (Gloria Stuart). After the Civil War he marries her. He cannot get his symphonies played and his son turns out to be a loafer. Finally as an old man Carl Hausmann has one more cross to bear. His grandson, whom he adores, has inherited not only his talent for composing but his ear for Schmalzmusik. When poor old Carl Hausmann totters into publishers' offices with his symphonies, he is accused of plagiarizing his grandson's successful jazz.
Life history is often a successful pattern for the cinema. Like many of its predecessors, Beloved contains strong sentiment and the appearance of sincerity. But when Carl Hausmann finally gets his symphony played in Carnegie Hall, he is such a battered old wreck that it all seems hardly worth while.
Four Frightened People (Paramount) is really two frightened pictures—first a parody of jungle adventure and then a jungle adventure itself. The shot that punctuates the change is one of Claudette Colbert losing her glasses and thereby discovering that she is beautiful.
Before that, she has been a Chicago geography teacher, escaping from a plague-ridden tourist boat through a Malay jungle in the company of a bombastic reporter (William Gargan), a woman birth control propagandist (Mary Boland) and a diffident chemist (Herbert Marshall). The birth-control enthusiast is left as hostage with a tribe of natives to whose warriors her precepts are an unwelcome benefit.
The geography teacher begins to realize that the reporter is less heroic than she had supposed and the chemist much more likable, but neither of them really notices her.
By losing her glasses and discovering her glamour, the geography teacher becomes, according to the gallant code of Director Cecil Blount De Mille, a person to be taken seriously. The rest of Four Frightened People is therefore a routine jungle uproar, full of radiator squeakings, poisoned arrows, hairbreadth escapades and swampland romance. Typical shot: Claudette Colbert washing in a waterfall.