Word: themes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Daily Bread" the cinema becomes socially conscious and treats with a theme that is truly proletarian. In an attempt to give a "powerful" treatment to a story of the common man harassed by truly gigantic economic forces, King Vidor has an obvious sincerity. Because of this notable sincerity and the courage of the theme itself, one is loathe to level the criticism of triteness against "Our Daily Bread." But sympathetic as one may be to such a sudden nobility in movie subjects, and we do believe this to be genuinely sincere, it is hard to see any symptoms of masterpiece...
Power (Gaumont-British). About the only theme on which the cinema is able to express a definite opinion is the virtue of tolerance. The misfortunes of Jews in Germany supply an apt text for sermons on this subject. An adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger's famed novel Jew Suss, Power lacks both the clarity and the subtlety of its original but it is not, like A Lost Lady, needless vandalism. Angry and outspoken, it derives force from its sincerity and amounts to an elaborate parable of which there are two reels too many...
...Francine Larrimore, tending the Solomon sidewalk cigar stand with puzzled petulance, gives her best performance since Brief Moment. No less genuine than Florrie as self-respecting tenement dwellers are Ma Solomon, and Butcher Freiberg who, when asked for an explanation of the Solomons' misfortunes, voices the dry, dialectic theme of Spring Song: "When you are young, you expect everything from life. When you get older, you expect nothing...
...speech was read by Irita Van Doren, editor of the Herald Tribune's Books Supplement. Her text was the inscription at the base of the statue of Nurse Cavell who, before she was taken out to be shot as a spy, said: "Patriotism is not enough." Her theme: "The one thing that matters more than all the rest is international relations...
...unintended insult. Says Author Maurice Samuel: "I think a good slogan for my novel might be, 'A Novel that Women Will Hate.' " Propaganda for masculine superiority, Beyond Woman is written with a passion that some readers will think proud, others despairing. Author Samuel's theme, that man's spirit is continually struggling against the earthward pull of woman's nature, will tread uncomfortably hard on many a U. S. husband's tender toe. If wives are so ill-advised as to read it, it may annoy them, but only temporarily...