Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 7, 1935

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That the delicacy, diffidence and power of Author Hémon's writing is in large part retained by this picture is doubtless due partly to the fact that Director Julien Duvivier made most of it on location. He took a cast of Paris actors to northern Quebec last year, used as many natives as possible for crowd scenes and bits. First shown in Paris last winter, Maria Chapdelaine promptly won the Grand Prix du Cinema Français. More noteworthy is the fact that it has been even more successful in Germany, where the critic of the Berliner Volks-Zeitimg was less enthusiastic than his colleagues when he wrote: "It is the greatest work of the French cinema and we should wish such films might be made in Germany."

As shown in the U. S., Maria Chapdelaine has English subtitles.

Red Salute (Reliance). The inability of Hollywood producers to deal with contemporary political and social problems is only less painfully exhibited by their customary reluctance to try it than by their timid stupidity when they do. In Red Salute, Producer Edward Small was patently under the impression that, by making the villain of the piece a campus radical, he was hurling an intellectual bombshell of some sort at the U. S. cinema public. The picture's release at the Rivoli Theatre in Manhattan last week actually caused a disturbance at which 18 adolescents were arrested for wagging idiotic handbills.

Drue Van Allen (Barbara Stanwyck), in love with the driveling campus radical (Hardie Albright), is sent to Mexico to get over it by her choleric Army officer father. There she meets a roistering young soldier (Robert Young) whom she tricks into helping her get back to Washington. What at times, during the return trip in a trailer owned by an irresponsible person with a soft baritone voice (Cliff Edwards), almost becomes a passable imitation of It Happened One Night, degenerates on their arrival into a tedious display of Red-baiting, climaxed when the soldier breaks up the meeting at which the radical is making a speech. Silliest shot: Robert Young pointing to a U. S. flag tattooed on his forearm.

King Solomon of Broadway (Universal). In this inoffensive little program picture, outfitted with almost continuous music and hand-me-down wisecracks, King Solomon (Edmund Lowe) operates a night club built chiefly with funds supplied by a dangerous convict. King loses his hotspot in a poker game, finds the dangerous convict unexpectedly out on parole. While attending to these difficulties, he rescues a Long Island heiress (Louise Henry) from kidnappers, loses his heart to an entertainer (Dorothy Page) and a small dog named Hamburger. The smart talk, unfortunately, is the sort that goes sour in any mouth but Mae West's. Says Miss Page to the convict, who is patting her leg: "That's the wooden one—be careful of the splinters."

King Solomon of Broadway, however, manages to be ingratiating when Band Leader Pinky Tomlin is blinking with fright or playing his guitar, when Miss Page is singing and strutting.