Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 8, 1932

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Back Street (Universal). Fannie Hurst's tender and moving biography of a kept woman is here reproduced in a sincere, detailed picture. Irene Dunne is the big-hearted daughter of a German notion-store keeper in Cincinnati. She falls in love with John Boles, a pedigreed young banker, who by a series of misunderstandings, makes her his mistress instead of his wife. Though Boles is selfish and niggardly, she rejects an old sweetheart who offers her position and wealth. The young banker becomes a big banker, supported by his mistress' advice. Going to Europe on a Reparations commission, he takes his mistress on one deck, his wife & children on another. One of the children attempts to pay off the mistress. Boles arrives in time to realize that her small linger is worth more to him than children, wife, fortune and career. He says: "She has taken only that part of me which none of you has seemed to want, or the existence of which you have even bothered about; and for it she has sacrificed everything that a woman has a right to believe is hers." Next day he has a paralytic stroke. He mutters his mistress' name into the telephone and dies. The chastened son offers to provide for her but she. aged with calamitous suddenness, dies too.

Back Street, novel and cinema, is based on the potent appeal of a character who humbly takes a prolonged beating from the world and the other characters. The situation of the heroine is socially, morally, economically and emotionally improbable, but genuinely affecting. Director John M. Stahl has elaborated the period detail of pre-War Cincinnati and Manhattan nearly as painstakingly as did Author Hurst. Examples: The high, ugly bandstand and the uniforms of the band playing Sousa's marches-on Sunday afternoon in Cincinnati; the three-step stoop before the notion store where the family chairs are drawn on summer evenings; the restfulness of the street noises—plodding hooves on cobbles, a teamster's gi-yap; pre-War Broad & Wall Streets, before the grey House of Morgan filled the corner.

White Zombie (United Artists) is the latest jitter & gooseflesh cinema. Dracula was the first of the current witches' Sabbath of horror pictures (TIME, Feb. 23, 1931), followed by Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue and Freaks. All have been box office successes.

White Zombie is based on Negro metaphysical practices in Haiti, which Author William B. Seabrook. credulous savage-lover, exploited in The Magic Island. Seabrook was enthusiastically noncommittal about the actual existence of ''zombies'' (animated dead men). The picture fervently believes in them. Dazed Madge Bellamy has come to Haiti to marry slack-jawed John Harron. Robert Frazer. her secret admirer, invites the two young people to his house to be married. To prevent the marriage he goes to a zombie tycoon. Bela Lugosi. who looks like a comic imbecile, can make his jawbones rigid and show-the whites of his eyes. These abilities qualify him to make strong men cower and women swoon. Bela's zombie factory is going full-blast. Corpses carry baskets, grind the mill, do the upstairs work. Bela Lugosi suggests to half-good, half-bad Robert Frazer that they turn Madge into a zombie. After moral convulsions, Frazer gives Madge Bellamy a rose on which is a drop of potent magic. After the wedding ceremony, Bela Lugosi cuts a woman's figure out of a wax candle, then melts it in a flame. Madge crumples too, is buried. Frazer and Bela Lugosi disinter and install her in a craggy castle where vultures scream and Bela Lugosi is served by a group of stalking zombies, enemies whom he has devitalized by black magic, interred, disinterred and enslaved. With expressions of frozen agony, like figures in a waxworks they shuffle woodenly about on Lugosi's horrid errands. Meanwhile John Harron has found a priest, Joseph Cawthorn, who knows about Haitian voodoo worship. Together they find the fabulous castle. They save Madge Bellamy, vanquish evil by the power of love, horse sense and blackjacks.

As the picture scrupulously explains, zombies are a superstition. But it adds that "wherever there is a superstition, you will find there is also a fact." Voodoo is still esoterically practiced in Haiti. The Penal Code, Article 249, reads: "If, after the administration of such substances [drugs to induce a coma-like death] the person has been buried, the act shall be considered murder, no matter what result follows." No scientist has investigated zombies. But reports indicate that the term means people who have died of disease, old age or wounds and. before decomposition, been reanimated. White Zombie combines voodoo murder prac tice and zombie resurrection, proposing that a zombie is a man who is still alive but whose soul and brain have been killed by remote hypnosis. Cinema zombies are oddly hypnotized men, more credible to cinemaddicts than true resurrected corpses, such as fabulously stalk the Haitian jungles.

The acting of everybody in White Zombie suggests that there may be some grounds for believing in zombies.

Bela Lugosi, son of Banker Baron Lugosi. was born in Lugos, Hungary, 49 years ago. He stands 6 ft. i in., has bulging blue eyes, was a famed actor in Budapest for ten years before the War. A sympathizer of Count Karolyi during the Revolution, he fled Hungary when the Royalists returned to power. In 1925 in Manhattan he learned the lines of a Spanish Apache in The Red Poppy, without knowing enough English to know what he was saying.