Cinema: The New Pictures: Feb. 24, 1936

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Bugle Ann (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Night after night when dampness has flushed the black-dark woods and scents are strong and clear, hounds run in Missouri. Practicing one of the oldest U. S. sports, their masters sit around bonfires in convenient clearings, following the hunt of their bugle-voiced foxhounds by ear alone. Of this breed was Bugle Ann, a real bugler, rare even among its own kind, about which MacKinlay Kantor wrote his short best-selling novel, played in the picture by a prize bitch from the pack of Sheriff Tom Bash of Kansas City, Mo. Bitch, to be sure, was a word Spring Davis (Lionel Barrymore) would not allow used for his lady-dog. He believed in general that a dog was as good a friend as a man, except that it had none of a man's faults. When an interloper (Dudley Digges) circled his sheep pasture with woven-wire fence, hog-tight, bull-strong, and horse-high, Spring held him for an enemy although his own son Benjy (Eric Linden) loved the interloper's daughter, Camden (Maureen O'Sullivan). One night of good hunting, a dog's pain-yip in the dark and a trail of Bugle Ann's footsteps stopping at the interloper's gate made Spring feel that his neighbor had killed his lady. Therefore he killed the interloper with a bullet from his lever-action Winchester and was unmoved when they sent him to state's prison for 20 years. When he got out in four, he found that Camden had the explanation for his pardon, and for the ghost of Bugle Ann which ran the woods the night of his return. So nearly a scenario was Kantor's novel that Samuel Hoffenstein and Harvey Gates could have written most of their adaptation with a pair of shears and a paste-pot. Yet no company but M-G-M bid for the book. It is as far from conventional screen material as a good fox-night from the sick air of a soundstage. Director Richard Thorpe has kept a newsreel vitality in his telling of the tale, much of which was made in Missouri, almost the whole of it out-of-doors. It is Lionel Barrymore's best part in years and a valid and vital contribution to current cinema. Some shots: Possums drowsing on a bough, hounds running down a gulley, seen from above; a fox in his den, snapping at the hounds through the narrow opening; the courthouse at Jefferson City, Mo.

The Prisoner of Shark Island (Twentieth Century-Fox). Suggested to Producer Darryl Zanuck by a story in TIME (Feb. 4, 1935), this picture investigates the sad case of Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd. On April 15, 1865, two horsemen galloped up to Dr. Mudd's door in Charles County, Md. and asked for help. One had a broken leg; Dr. Mudd set it. Later that day the horsemen galloped away. The injured one was John Wilkes Booth. For his services, Dr. Mudd found himself suspected of being party to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was court martialed, with seven other suspects, sentenced to life imprisonment in Fort Jefferson, on the dry Tortugas, off the southern tip of Florida. He tried to escape, failed, was put in a solitary dungeon. When yellow fever killed the prison's doctor and scores of its 1,000 convicts, Dr. Mudd volunteered his services, worked heroically to stem the epidemic. In the spring of 1869 he was pardoned by President Andrew Jackson.