Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 18, 1937

God's Country and the Woman

(Warner Bros.). Instead of Arabia or Becky Sharp, Producer Hal Wallis chose the more realistic subject of the Northwest woods and the logging industry for this Technicolor. Cast, technical crew, Director William Keighley and Red Spierling, logging superintendent of the Crown Willamette Paper Co., whose crew set a world's record in 1931 by getting out 1,662,000 ft. of lumber in a single day, spent two months at Longview, Wash., making the outdoor sequences. The result, as background of a story loosely adapted from James Oliver Curwood's 1922 novel, is the most spectacular investigation of the lumber industry so far contributed by the screen. It is also in many respects the most effective, because least exotic, contribution to the screen so far made in Technicolor.

Recalled from a playboy career in Europe by his brother who heads the family lumber company, Steve Russett (George Brent) lands a plane on a lake in timber that belongs to their arch rival, Jo Barton. When Jo Barton (Beverly Roberts) turns out to be a spitfire blonde, Steve stays on as a lumberjack, works up to foreman before Jo finds out who he is. By the time she fires him as a spy, they are in love. This complicates his brother's scheme to force Jo to sell him her land by engineering a jam of Barton logs that her men can reach only by trespassing on Russett property. Steve, who has already expressed his devotion to Jo by fighting with a disloyal lumberjack (Barton MacLane), winning the esteem of her foreman (Alan Hale), and driving a supply train through a Russett barricade, finally makes her believe in it by dynamiting the jam while the personnel of both lumber camps enjoy a free-for-all fight on the river bank. Good shots: An expert logger nonchalantly retrieving a water bottle from the notch in a fir tree, just as the notch closes when the tree falls; the timber country color photographed from the air, with fir-covered mountains spread out to blue horizons in the pattern of enormous deep-green surf.

Camille (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). For this version of Alexandre Dumas' famed tearjerker, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer assembled the three best current writers of tearjerkers, the top director of tearjerkers, the screen's No. i tragedienne and the industry's current male box-office sensation. The result, against the lush background of Art Director Cedric Gibbons' notion of 19th Century Paris, equipped with generous measures of sorrow, pictorial beauty, charm, plot, glamour and audience appeal, amounts to a Camillennium.

Marguerite Gautier (Greta Garbo), Parisian demimondaine, breaks with her protector (Henry Daniell) when she falls in love with young Armand Duval (Robert Taylor), breaks with Duval when his father tells her she is spoiling his career, finally dies of consumption complicated by a broken heart. For modern audiences this story lacks one element: surprise. Its situations, from the one in which Armand first shows his love for Marguerite by returning to her a handkerchief which he has kept in his pocket ever since the day six months before when she dropped it in a theatre, to the one in which, dying, she struggles to her dressing table to rouge her pale cheeks when he comes to visit her for the last time, have become a master pattern for generations of romantic tragedies.