Cinema: Again Arbuckle?

(2 of 3)

In the effort to vary, however slightly, the frayed formula for underworld pictures, Warner Brothers stumbled into the environment of illegal gambling, a field so fertile it is hard to see how it had hitherto been neglected. Nick is played by Edward G. Robinson, an actor with the face of a depraved cherub and a voice which makes everything he says seem violently profane. In Smart Money he does again several of the things he did in Little Caesar but not so many that the role is repetitious. His pal, who dies after Nick has hit him for suggesting that his last bad blonde is a stoolpigeon, is James Cagney (Public Enemy).

The Viking (Varick Frissell Production) is the picture about seal hunting which the late Varick Frissell, Yale '26, nephew of Pennsylvania's Governor Pinchot, was finishing when his ship blew up off White Bay, Newfoundland, killing him and 25 others (TIME, March 23). It tells a feeble love story about two sealers, one a braggart, the other a "jinker" (unlucky sealer), both attached to the same girl. But interesting and important is the middle part of the picture where the love story is practically forgotten and there is shown a journalistic record of a perilous and picturesque method of earning a livelihood. Producer Frissell secured an old-time sealing boat, the Viking, and the services of Captain Bob Bartlett, who skippered Admiral Peary to the Pole and has since realized handsomely on the exploit, to sail it. Better still, he secured a cast of 250 Newfoundland "swilers," photographed them honestly engaged in a real seal-hunt.

Episodes in the seal-hunt have that intimate realism which the cinema alone can give such a subject. The Viking grinds through ice sometimes so thick that it has to be dynamited. When a radio report reveals a seal herd 20 miles away, the swilers debark and scramble over 20 miles of broken ice to find them. The hunt itself —the men deploying to stalk the seals, killing them with shotguns—is ably but too briefly photographed. Tragic is the situation of one squeaking white baby seal, stuck to a lump of ice; when his mother pauses to nose him off, both are shot. After the hunt, the sealers haul their "sculps" (seal skins) back across the ice. The jinker and his rival get left behind in a blizzard, the story sets in again.

Much of the excitement which Producer Frissell felt about seal-hunting survives in his picture (he was going to call it White Thunder) and saves it both from the apathy of newsreels and from the pretentiousness of most commercialized films intended to be exotic. Best shot in The Viking is an iceberg with waves breaking against it. Producer Frissell wanted also to make a shot of an iceberg turning over and had gone back to Labrador to try to get one when the Viking blew up. Before The Viking's Manhattan premiere last week, Dr. and Mrs. Lewis Fox Frissell gave a dinner to Governor and Mrs. Pinchot; their other son, Phelps Montgomery Frissell, was killed eight years ago while climbing in the Alps.

Confessions of a Co-ed (Paramount) is an excessively stupid little production which serves no apparent purpose except to belittle the talents of Cinemactress Sylvia Sidney who is featured in it. She appears as a college student bedazzled by a classmate (Phillips Holmes) whose toothy smiles will seem to audiences less seductive than benign. When he seduces and deserts her, she marries his