If a Frenchman sees a thing and likes it, he improves upon it. The Orientals invented perfumes, the Hobrews invented clothing, the Americans invented the League of Nations, but they are all indisputably French now, and much improved by the process. And so it is with the talkies. It is the essence of a French talking-picture that contains subtle refinements on the Hollywood craft which transforms the craft into something at least approaching an art. Such is the case with "Les Cinq Gentlemen Maudits" presented today and tomorrow by the French Talking Films Committee at the Geography Building.

The author of the plot has taken the idea of "Thirteen Women," which crime club addicts remember as the grisly melodrama of Frauenzimmer from a sorority who were all condemned to die mysteriously one after the other. This ingenious device is applied to five gentlemen traveling in Morocco, who impolitely resist the demands of an old beggar for baksheesh, and are therefore cursed with a fate which shall overtake them in order before the next phase of the moon. But the logical French mind can allow no such supernatural fakirs to succeed. One man dies, a newspaper reports the death of another, but that grinning grim reaper is defeated at last by the triumph of reason. This is to say that the denouement allows the hero to marry the heroine, and live happy ever after.

Technically, they say, the French are not the equals of the California engineers, but one has some doubts. The use of music throughout the film shows an imagination, an originality, and an ability to fit the music to the tempo which American films lack. The use of the camera, particularly in the opening scenes showing deck tennis, is equal to Hollywood's best, though not quite up to the standards so definitely set by the serious Germans. In chase scenes, a direct outgrowth of the Mack Sennet tradition, the director outdoes himself in making the sequences, tense with suspense, and in providing that complete ad absurdum which is the essence of true farce. To this movie there is a verve, a zest, an esprit which stamps it as typically French, and bon.