Cinema: The New Pictures Aug. 25, 1930

Moby Dick (Warner). Like The Sea Beast, the silent version of Herman Melville's story in which Barrymore appeared four years ago, this is a true moving picture, no less effective because a conventional love-interest has been added to the activities of a crazy one-legged sea-captain who wanted to get even with a whale. Across tremendous horizons the camera's eye wheels after the tiny whaling boat chasing a corporate phantom of monstrous, inhuman evil. All the work that a camera can do with great spaces and wild things is done, pictorially, as it should be. This Moby Dick is not a masterpiece. The concentration of the novel, the pressure of a mania growing until it makes the whale itself a Lilliputian thing, a mental cosine, is not managed, but Barrymore again makes a living character of Ahab. Triumphantly drunk, he swaggers through the wharfside brothels of the whaling town. There is a scene in which the stump of his bitten leg is seared with a hot iron and a closeup of him finally cutting his vengeance out of the whale that took the leg. Other great shots: the shanghaied crew of murderers; enlarged projections of the whaler under full sail in a choppy sea, wild-eyed Ahab battling a storm. The shot of the amputation was included, somewhat differently, in The Sea Beast, but the whole picture is new, entirely reconstructed and rephotographed.

Love in the Ring (Terra-Ton). Max Schmeling made this picture while he was at home in Germany last year, several months before he won the world's heavyweight championship on a foul from Jack Sharkey in Manhattan (TiME, June 23). One does not have to understand German to follow the occasional dialog sequences, so simple is the story of a fighter momentarily distracted from his boyhood sweetheart by the wiles of attractive Olga Tschechowa. Fighter Schmeling, composed and earnest, is helped through his scenes by considerate direction; he is more convincing when amorous than during a tedious fight with a gargantuan opponent in which both cock their punches for the camera. The stage fights of one-time Champion Jack Dempsey, experienced vaudevillian and actor, with Estelle Taylor Dempsey, in the Manhattan play The Big Fight, were more realistic than this picture, but Dempsey acted on the whole more self-consciously than Schmeling. Well-read, interested in painting, the German takes seriously this chance at artistic expression and holds his end up well in a better cast than ever set off Dempsey's productions. Best sequences: introducing the amicable, beer-garden domesticity that is the background of German boxing.