The New Pictures

Rio Rita (RKO). No one can enjoy musical comedy unless he has trained himself to endure patiently the dull moments that fall between a song and a dance and a story. These moments in Rio Rita consist of a heavy melodrama about a Mexican girl, a captain of the Texas Rangers, an alleged bandit. The vehicle is a handsome series of photographs, occasionally colored, of a musical comedy. Knowing that years of success had made the original music boring, the producers have put in some good new songs, the best being "Sweetheart, We Need Each Other." RKO's policy of revivifying somewhat shopworn stars by publicizing them as new discoveries has worked out well with Bebe Daniels. She may not have as good a voice as Ziegfeld's stage Rita (Ethylind Terry) but she sings well enough and gets her lines over. Best shots : Miss Daniels in her metal dress; a Mexican padrone respect fully kissing a moneyed young man be cause he takes him to be a safecracker.

Even her friends never knew Bebe Daniels could sing, but no cinematically informed person, hearing that she was going to try, would doubt her ability to do it. For 20 years Bebe Daniels has done everything that any scenario required her to do. In the old Pathe comedies she used to get plastered with dough, tossed in blankets, dumped into ponds out of laundry baskets. Before that she took child roles with Selig. From Pathe she graduated to wearing silver wigs in Cecil B. De Mille's period pictures. Lately, in her 40th to 49th pictures inclusive, she has been uniformily a slightly madcap but inherently sensible heroine whose activities whether in college (The Campus Flirt), a newspaper office (Hot News), a bathing suit (Swim, Girl, Swim, The Palm Beach Girl), or more esoteric backgrounds (A Kiss in a Taxi, Lovers in Quarantine, Senorita), embodied a gaiety only faintly flavored with sentiment. Bebe Daniels had a good time and seldom took a holiday. She was engaged to Charles ("Fastest Human") Paddock, but called it off. One winter there was a popular song called "Bebe, Be Mine" and even now when she goes to a cabaret the orchestra leader usually recognizes her and starts to play it--a gay, only lightly sentimental song. Bebe Daniels likes all games but likes swimming better and riding still better and best of all to drive a fast car fast. She is seldom arrested.

Applause (Paramount). It is surprising to find Helen Morgan, who only a short while ago was very much of an ingenue, cast now as a tired burlesque actress witha grown daughter. It is equally surprising to find Rouben Mamoulian, recently director of legitimate productions for Manhattan's Theatre Guild, experimenting so weakly with the cinema. He takes the life out of a routine story, always effective hitherto, by exaggerating the characters and by padding slack scenes with camera tricks. The triangle consists of , Miss Morgan, her tough pimping lover, and her daughter who, since her birth under the rose in a stage dressing room, lived in a convent until sent for to join the burlesque troupe. . Applause entertains only at certain moments when Miss Morgan becomes vividly the flabby, debauched, tender, overscented queen she is playing. Technical absurdities: high mass in the convent with some nuns in church and others idling about watching them; the uniform fatness of the chorines; the company parading round the table on which Miss Morgan has just borne the baby.

His Glorious Night (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Playing a poor soldier in love with a princess involves John Gilbert in continual changes of uniform, combined with kissing, eye-rolling and declamation that surpasses all his previous efforts at military love. Before he marries Catherine Dale Owen, a succession of amatory scenes has been enacted in arbors and balconies with a frenzy that may cause the Gilbert public, usually respectful, to titter. Dialog from Ferenc Molnar's play, Olympia, adapted by Willard Mack, is recited by Gilbert as though it were blank verse. Only good shot: a fall in a steeplechase.

They Had to See Paris (Fox). Always uncomfortable when he is being photographed, Will Rogers tried to create the easy atmosphere of the legitimate stage by extemporizing wisecracks and routine not specified in his adaptation of Homer Croy's novel. Usually his antics, having mixed up the cast and irritated his director, were halted, and the extemporized pieces shot over again. In the finished film Rogers' unassumed self-consciousness helps to make sharper his portrait of an Oklahoma oil man who takes his family to Paris to get background. The situations are conventional but fairly funny and so is the dialog which Owen Davis and Rogers worked on together. Best shot: Rogers and the Grand Duke Michael of Russia on the stairs.

Fast Company (Paramount). Ring Lardner's and George M. Cohan's story about a swell-headed baseball player differed radically, even as a stage piece, from most stories about swell-headed people. This Elmer, the ballplayer, does not play practical jokes or make himself objectionable and is not forced to undergo a change of character in the denouement so as to be tolerated by the public. He is a nice fellow, not brainy but good-natured, cocky but not ambitious, always trying to eat more than his trainer wants him to. The cinema is better than the play. Formal plot has been cut down until Fast Company is little more than a character sketch. Mildly, continuously amusing, it makes you think of Lardner's syndicated comic strips about baseball, pleasant and somehow realistic tableaux arranged around wisecracks. Best shot: Jack Oakie expounding his theory of dietetics.

Forest People of Siberia (Russian). The Udes are a people without a country. They have only a land--the vast pitted deltas, the gelid rivers, the forests of Ussirsky. Over this they wander periodically, as if not quite convinced that every corner of it is alike. Some freemason Soviet cameraman photographed their hunts and travels in a local-color picture which is well-made and interesting though a little tedious. One Ude kills a boar with a rifle. Another with a long spear waits beside a bush for a leaf to rustle, and when the bush turns into a bear and scrambles a few dismayed steps to a sapling which in his terror he pitifully tries to climb, the Ude secures material for a feast. Best shot: a Ude seeing his own cinematic image.