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1932. In MATA HARI “Greta Garbo delivers another brilliant portrayal.” ROAD TO LIFE is “a somewhat amateurish melodrama with here and there a sentimental strain, but many of the scenes have obviously been inspired by actual happenings.” SHANGHAI EXPRESS is “an exciting ride” and “by all odds the best picture Josef von Sterberg has directed.” GRAND HOTEL is “worthy of all the talk it has created and the several motion picture luminaries deserve to feel very proud of their performances, especially Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore. Edmund Goulding’s direction is excellent, but occasionally he relies too much on close-ups.” Ufa’s English version of CONGRESS DANCES is “a charming spectacle of Vienna in 1814, filled with tuneful melodies one likes to remember and blessed with pleasing light comedy.” A NOUS, LA LIBERTÉ is “like snapshots of a weird dream – There is little real dialogue, music being often relied upon to do the ‘talking’. The humor, despite its farcical nature, is provocative of thought rather than laughter.” SCARFACE is “efficiently acted and directed” but “as was once said of THE COVERED WAGON, that it was all very well if you liked wagons, so this is an excellent diversion for those who like to study the activities of cowardly thugs.” If AS YOU DESIRE ME is Miss Garbo’s valedictory to the American screen she “has the satisfaction of leaving the MGM studios in a blaze of glory.” A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT is “an intelligent, restrained and often stirring picture . . . Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal in an exceptionally fine one.” I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG is “a vehement attack on convict camps. The producers do not mince matters in this melodrama.” THE SIGN OF THE CROSS is “staged impressively and finely photographed. There is an abundance of imagination throughout its scenes and the story is well told. One feels, however, the players must have been relieved when the production was finished.” The characters in Rasputin and the Empress are “exceptionally well delineated, and besides the experienced and talented performances of the Barrymores, there is an unusually clever characterization of Czar Nicholas by Ralph Morgan . . . The film is further distinguished by the knowledgeable guidance of director Richard Boleslavsky.”

1933. In all the scenes of CAVALCADE “there is a meticulous attention to detail, not only in the settings, but also in the selection of players . . . a most impressive and affecting picture.” While “in the French stage version TOPAZE was looked upon as bitingly satirical . . . the humor in this picture has taken a downward trend.” Via “multiple exposures, processed shots and a variety of camera-angle wizardry KING KONG sets forth an adequate story and furnishes enough thrills for any devotee of such tales.” 42ND STREET is “the liveliest, and one of the most tuneful, musical comedies that has come out of Hollywood.” GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE is “a curious, somewhat fantastic, and often melodramatic story, but nevertheless one which at this time is very interesting . . . It is surprising that a Britisher should have been responsible for the book on which it is based.” MORGENROT is “in a class by itself far away the most realistic offering of its kind . . . produced so effectively it seems like a graphic account of the actual exploits of a submarine and not a story pictured years after hostilities ceased.” Although THE SONG OF SONGS is “no dramatic bombshell, Rouben Mamoulian has produced a film of striking beauty, and Marlene Dietrich floats through it with the lyric grace of that apparition which was sent by Heaven to be a moment’s ornament.” DINNER AT EIGHT “has a cast of 25, and among the players are most of the stellar lights of the MGM studios, beside a few borrowed from other con panics. It is one of those rare pictures which keeps you in your seat until the final fadeout, for nobody wants to miss one of the scintillating lines.” EMPEROR JONES is “a distinguished offering, resolute and firm with a most compelling performance by Paul Robeson.” Even though THUNDER OVER MEXICO “may fall short of what might have been had its director, Sergei M. Eisenstein himself supervised the assembling and cutting of the mass of scenes he photographed in Mexico, it is, until the latter stages, a testimonial to it producer’s imagination, skill and artistry.” “Charles Laughton is at the top of his form in the title role it THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII . . . a remarkably well-produced film both in the matter of direction, the settings, and the selection of the exterior scenes.” “The fractious con duct of a film star, portrayed by Jean Harlow, and the sensational stunts inspired by a studio publicity expert acted by Lee Tracy, generate no little hilarity in BOMBSHELL.”

1934. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is “a good piece of fiction, which, with all its feverish stunts, is blessed with bright dialogue and a good quota of relatively restrained scenes.” In DAVID HARUM “Will Robers has an extraordinary facility for getting under the skin of his characters without make-up or actually submerging his own personality.” “John Barrymore is in fine fettle in 20th Century and it is his best performance since the one he gave in REUNION IN VIENNA.” THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET is “a drama of beauty, dignity and nobility. There will be applause for Norma Shearer’s Elizabeth, Fredric March’s Robert Browning and Charles Laughton’s Mr. Barrett, but for the high-minded aspirations which went into its production there can be nothing less than a shout of benediction.” OUR DAILY BREAD, which King Vidor wrote, directed and produced, and financed himself, is “a brilliant declaration of faith in the importance of the cinema as a social instrument.” “Although THE PRESIDENT VANISHES is unlikely to plunge the country into the bitter fratricide that preliminary gossip had led us to expect, it is an exciting example of the topical cinema, a racy and biting melodrama which assaults the war-makers with picturesque violence.”

1935. CHAPAYEV is “probably the best talking picture so far turned out in the USSR.” Producer David O. Selznick’s DAVID COPPERFIELD “encompasses the rich and kindly humanity of the original so brilliantly that it becomes a screen masterpiece in its own right.” ROBERTA is “a model of urbanity in the musical films and Mr. Astaire, the debonair master of light comedy and the dance, is its chief ornament.” In LILIOM “Charles Boyer gives further proof of his versatility. He makes entirely credible the devil-may-care attendant of a merry-go-round who loses his job because of a flirtation with a servant girl and then proceeds to live supported by her and his aunt.” BLACK FURY, “magnificently performed by Paul Muni, it comes up taut against the censorial safety belts and tells a stirring tale of industrial war in the coal fields.” LES MISERABLES is “unbelievably thrilling in all the departments of its manufacture, and it makes a memorable experience in the cinema.” “THE SCOUNDREL contains the most dazzling writing that this column has ever heard on the screen . . . it is a distinctly exhilarating event in the cinema regardless of whether you look upon it as art or as spinach.” IN THE INFORMER John Ford “recites Liam O’Flaherty’s realistic drama of the Dublin slums with bold and smashing skill. In his hands THE INFORMER becomes, at one and the same time, a striking psychological study of a gutter Judas and a rawly impressive picture of the Dublin underworld during the Black and Tan terror.” “Science and art, the handmaidens of the cinema, have joined hands to endow the screen with a miraculous new element in BECKY SHARP, the first full-length photoplay produced in the three-component color process of Technicolor. Although BECKY SHARP is dramatically tedious it is probably the most significant event of the 1935 cinema.” “Hollywood bestows a garland on the languishing summer cinema in the splendid screen version of ALICE ADAMS.” Greta Garbo, “the first lady of the screen, sins, suffers and perishes illustriously in the new, ably produced and comparatively mature version of ANNA KARENINA.” THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS “is one of the fascinating pictures of the year.” “The weird and wonderful history of ‘H.M.S. Bounty’ is magnificently transferred to the screen in MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY.” “AH, WILDERNESS! brings Eugene O’Neill’s ‘large small-town’ in the New England of 1906 into a new richness of life on the screen.” “Produced in Selznick’s most lavish and careful mood, A TALE OF TWO CITIES errs, if at all, on the side of plenty . . . It has everything, which means it leaves nothing to the imagination.”

1936. “THE GHOST GOES WEST, René Clair’s first English-speaking film, is not pure Clair, or even characteristic Clair, because, for the first time, he is working in a strange language and from a script that is not his own. Robert Sherwood, who wrote the screenplay, is as much a part of the film as the director himself.” In reviewing Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES Frank S. Nugent began by saying that although Chaplin himself had refused to talk in it, “he has raised the ban against dialogue for other members of the cast.” Then, after mentioning the “rumor that the head of the Soviet film industry had counseled Chaplin about the ending of MODERN TIMES, and that Chaplin, accepting that advice, had made significant changes,” Mr. Nugent said he “preferred to describe MODERN TIMES as the story of the little clown, temporarily caught up in the cogs of an industry geared to mass production, spun through a three-ring circus and out into a world as remote from industrial and class problems as a comedy can make it.” THE STORY OF LOU PASTEUR, Mr. Nugent thought, departs from fact but is nevertheless “an excellent biography, just as it is a notable photoplay, dignified in subject, dramatic in treatment, and brilliantly played by Paul Muni, Fril Lieber, Josephine Hutchinson an many other members of the cast. Said Mr. Nugent in his review of MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN: “The directing-writing combination of Frank Capra and Robert Riskin has spiced Clarence Buddington Kelland’s story with wit, novelty an ingenuity, and, spurred by capital performances . . . this picture move easily into the pleasant realm reserved for the season’s most enter taming films.” “FURY is the finest original drama the screen has provided this year. Its theme is mob violence, its approach is coldly judicial, its treatment as relentless an unsparing as the lynching it portrays.” “MARY OF SCOTLAND, richly produced, dignified, and stirringly dramatic, must be considered one of the year’s notable photoplays.” “MGM the Magnificent has loosed its technical magic upon Will Shakespeare and has fashioned for his ROMEO AND JULIET a jeweled set ting in which the deep beauty of his romance glows and sparkles and gleams with breathless radiance.” “MY MAN GODFREY is the daffiest comedy of the year.” CARNIVAL IN FLANDERS (LA KERMESSE HEROIQUE) is “an outstanding picture by any standards save those of strict moralists and stricter religionists.” “The film version of DODSWORTH does more than justice to Mr. Howard’s play, converting a necessarily episodic tale, interrupted by fourteen curtains, into a smooth-flowing narrative of sustained interest, well-defined performances, and good talk.” and “Between the two of them, Charles Laughton and Alexander Korda have produced a great, and rich, and glowing motion picture in REMBRANDT.” “WINTERSET is a forceful screen drama of importance, produced with unswerving allegiance to the spirit of the Maxwell Anderson I play that sired it.”

1937. THE ETERNAL MASK is “a dramatic and imaginative study of guilt obsession” and “one of the most unusual, absorbing and provocative pictures to come our way in years.” “Through the perfect artistry of Garbo’s portrayal of Marguerite in CAMILLE a hackneyed theme is made new again, poignantly sad, hauntingly lovely . . . Robert Taylor is surprisingly good as Armand.” RKO-Radio’s “edition of Sean O’Casey’s THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS has softened his ironical thrusts by seeing no more in his play than appeared on its surface . . . The cast in general is as fine as the production. It is only with the script and the concept that we have any quarrel.” MGM’s “superb translation of Pearl Buck’s THE GOOD EARTH is one of the finest things Hollywood has done this season or any other. While some liberties have been taken with the novel’s text, none have been taken with its quality or spirit.” LOST HORIZON is “a grand adventure film, magnificently staged, beautifully photographed and capitally played. It is the second outstanding film of the season – the first, of course, being THE GOOD EARTH.” FIRE OVER ENGLAND is “impressive but dull.” “A STAR IS BORN is good entertainment by any standards, including the artistic, and convincing proof that Hollywood need not travel to Ruritania for its plots; there is drama a-plenty in its own backyard.” “NIGHT MUST FALL is a sober, evenly modulated and definitely unusual melodrama, sentiently directed and remarkably well-played.” “The Warners, who have achieved the reputation of being Hollywood’s foremost triflers with history, paid their debt to truth last night with the presentation of THE LIFE OF EMIL ZOLA. Rich, dignified, honest and strong, it is at once the finest historical film ever made and the greatest screen biography, greater even than THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR.” “The photographic eloquence of Joris Ivens’ admirable camera reporting makes THE SPANISH EARTH the most rational appeal the screen has thus far presented for the cause of Spanish democracy.” “Mayerling simplifies the tragedy by stating it in purely romantic terms . . . It is, in my opinion, the proper approach . . . It is another great photoplay, superbly produced, poetically written and faultlessly played.” NOTHING SACRED is “an impiously impish comedy about that recurrent journalistic marvel, the seven-day wonder.”

1938. UN CARNET DE BAT “actually lives up to the extravagant claims made for it abroad . . . A brilliant mosaic of drama and comedy, it bears the stamp of master craftsmanship . . . superbly written, unerringly directed, magnificently played – that last above all.” “What with George Cukor’s sense of directorial balance, good dialogue, the amusing supporting presence of Edward Everett Horton, Jean Dixon, Lew Ayres, Binnie Barnes and others, HOLIDAY comes satisfactorily close to being one. In fact, it is, and a pleasant one, too.” ALGIERS is a fascinating drama of a manhunt, a manhunt made all the more relentless because the hunters never really give pursuit, because the hunted never really is in flight.” FOUR DAUGHTERS is “one of the best pictures of anyone’s career, if only for the sake of the marvelously meaningful character of Mickey Borden as portrayed by John (formerly Jules) Garfield.” “THE EDGE OF THE WORLD is one of the most beautifully photographed, most unusual and most dramatic films England has given us this year – and England has sent over a number of great ones.” GRAND ILLUSION is “a strange and interesting film . . . that owes much to its cast. Erich von Stroheim’s appearance as von Rauflenstine reminds us again of Hollywood’s folly in permitting so fine an actor to remain idle and unwanted.” PYGMALION “marks the debut of a promising screenwriter, George Bernard Shaw . . . He has taught the American filmmakers something. He is showing them how valuable a writer can be . . . Wendy Ililler as Eliza Doolittle is a discovery . . . PYGMALION is good Shaw and a grand show.” If THE LADY VANISHES “were not so brilliant a melodrama, we should class it as a brilliant comedy.”

And with that, one of the last reviews in Volume II, I shall break off. Volume III begins with 1939, and in that year, many informed cinemaddicts believe, more “screen classics” were released than in any other single year in film history. And the “Times'” reviews of them are as interesting as any of the reviews from which I have quoted above.

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