The Cinema
" Thunder Over Mexico." At the Marble Arch Pavilion.
Tim approach of Thunder Over Mexico from across the Atlantic has been heralded by rumblings of controversy and flashes of indignation. The story of it all starts from the time when Sergei Eisenstein, the celebrated Russian director, went to California with a commission to make a talkie version of Theodore Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, for one of the big Hollywood companies. Failing to agree with his employers on the sociological implications of Dreiser's narra- tive, he approached Mr. Upton Sinclair and said that if he returned to Russia without having made a picture he would go as a defeated man. General Primo de Rivera had told him of splendid film material in Mexico—would Mr. Sinclair help him to go and photograph it ?
Financial support was arranged and Eisenstein set off, meaning to bring back a short travelogue after three months' work. But Mexico enthralled him ; soon he had worked out plans for a cycle of five full-length feature pictures. After he had shot 35 miles of film he was suddenly recalled to Russia, and this mass of unedited material, with a running time of about 35 hours, was left on Mr. Sinclair's hands. Mr. Sinclair tried in vain to send the film to Russia, but for some reason this was not allowed, nor was Eisenstein allowed to return to California. Eventually Mr. Sinclair had the film edited by professional cutters at Hollywood—a procedure which has cost him bitter reproaches from Eisenstein's admirers, who say that the result will give the world a wholly false idea of Eisenstein's original conception.
I have related these facts because I think they are neces-
sary to an understanding of what is actually being shown at the Marble Arch Pavilion. It seems that Mr. Sinclair has chosen one long episode from Eisenstein's cycle of five, and has given it a brief prelude and an abrupt epilogue. This episode is not a series of travel impressions but a grim dramatic tragedy, set on a Mexican hacienda about thirty years ago, during the tyrannical rule of President Diaz. A peon's bride is raped by an overseer and a few peons feebly try to revolt. They are hunted down and condemned to the " punishment of the horses." We see them buried up to the shoulders in the earth ; horsemen then gallop over them until they are dead. It is not pleasant to watch, but it is not meant to be pleasant.
Eisenstein likes to take endless pains over editing his own pictures, so that this present version is only based roughly on his ideas, but the cutting is vigorous and efficient, and no one, certainly, can accuse Mr. Sinclair of having watered down the Marxian moral. Indeed, the film—silent, with a good musical accompaniment—would be more dramatically successful if its Marxian intention were not so evident from the start. The peons are convincingly human ; the overseers, though skilfully handled, are less real than their jack-boots and their spurs. And the final hasty glimpse of a transformed Mexico, devoted to sport and machinery, only spoils the effect of the tragedy, and the memory of its wonderful landscape back- ground.
Eisenstein's camera-man, Tisse, has done marvellous work
in the pure, harsh Mexican sunshine. The peons in their blankets and white trousers, the spiky cactus-groves and rocky hill-sides, the shadows in the hacienda courtyard and the huge clouds floating overhead—I have never felt the atmosphere of a distant country so powerfully present on the screen.
Generally Released Next Week.
The Stranger's Return. Lionel Barrymore and Miriam Hopkins in drama of family life on American farm, directed by King Vidor. Quiet but vivid treatment ; unusual emotional sincerity.
Heroes for Sale. Richard Barthelmess as American ex- Service man out of work. Not always convincing, but has merits as a pungent social document.
It's a Boy, with Leslie Henson, and Up to the Neck, with Ralph Lynn, are efficient British farces. Traditional style of humour put over with lively effect.
CHARLES DAvY.
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