The New Pictures

The Aviator (Warner). Credit for this belongs properly neither to its actors nor director but to Warner Brothers' technicians and cameramen who arranged the funny and highly exciting stunt flying that is the climax of the action. It is all about a timid novelist who, as the author of a work on aviation, has to go up in a plane for the first time in his life. In The Hottentot, Edward Everett Horton, able farceur of this piece, was a fake jockey whom the horses frightened more than anything else in the world. The Aviator is a rewrite of The Hottentot and Horton works his familiar comic business into it without many additions but fairly effectively. Patsy Ruth Miller looks pretty, talks agreeably. Best shot: arranging the contest between the novelist and a famed French ace. Best sound: Horton's grunt.

Her Private Affair (Pathe) Director Paul Stein and his able cast have worked at this as carefully as though it were something new and imaginative. But Her Private Affair is not new. It is the familiar society murder story now arranged around Ann Harding as a Viennese woman who killed in a just cause, and whose husband is the presiding judge when an innocent suspect is tried for the case. In spite of a script containing a scene of two people struggling for a revolver and full of lines like "You wouldn't do this to me," Stein has used smart craftsmanship. He avoids telling the story in flashbacks from the trial of the woman herself, shows instead her reactions to the trial of someone else. When, after her confession, her own trial begins, the audience feels assured that she will be unanimously acquitted. Best shot: New Year's Eve in Vienna. Glorifying the American Girl (Paramount). A long time ago, when this picture was first planned. Florenz Ziegfeld was going to direct it himself. Then it was rumored that Erich von Stroheim had the job. Now J. P. McEvoy and Director Millard Webb have done the story and Irving Berlin, with three others, the music. It is a dull, shaky graph of a department store employe's rise to theatrical fame. Mary Eaton's pretty legs support a corner of the plot, which sags whenever legs are not enough. Rudy Vallee and a technicolor ballet have been worked in for specialties. Best shot: Eddie Cantor in an old act from the Ziegfeld Follies.

Hit the Deck (RKO). As a stage musical comedy, this was well liked three years ago. As a photograph of a stage musical comedy, it is handicapped by the fact that its great tunes--"Hallelujah" and "Sometimes I'm Happy"--are just old enough to be stale. Its story, stale to begin with, is laid in a seaport town populated by chorus girls who are always ready to swing into a routine, and by numerous chorus-boy sailors named Smith. Jack Oakie's talents are subdued by his struggles with the dialog. A girl named Polly Walker, new to films, who plays opposite him, has not enough vitality to get her role across. Best shot: fat Marguerita Padula, made up in blackface, leading the Negro chorus in the "Hallelujah'' number.

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