The New Pictures

Happy Days (Fox). This is one of the new enlarged pictures, samples of which have been issuing from Hollywood from time to time and which, on the Fox lot, are known as Grandeur Pictures. Last year a method was perfected for taking oversized pictures by photographing them on unusually big films, with lenses in proportion, instead of exaggerating an ordinary film in projection. Concocters of Fox publicity announced that Fox experts had found a way to make films "in three dimensions."

Happy Days proves that this resounding phrase was not accurate. Although a "Grandeur Picture" fills a screen about twice as wide as the conventional size, it is only two feet higher. With its new width the camera can take in two characters talking at the same time in the middle foreground, without switching its eye from one to the other but to make the faces clear, the characters must be cut off at the knee. Another advantage of the wide film is that it makes motion more exciting: moving things can be kept in sight against the same background twice as long as before. Countrysides, large masses of people, street shots, ballet numbers are better in Grandeur, but since the height of the Grandeur projection is practically the same as the old size there is no clarifying of perspective, no three-dimensional relief. Director Benjamin Stoloff has worked hard to show what he could do with choruses, always a baffling problem in conventional-sized films: wavering ribbons of dancing girls issue from two huge shoes; there is a baby carriage big enough to hold a dozen squallers at a time, and a birthday cake that dwarfs the actors. The story involves short vaudeville acts by such stars as Ann Pennington, Tom Patricola, Warner Baxter, Charles Farrell, Janet Gaynor, George Olsen, J. Harold Murray. They put on a benefit performance--no worse than most of the cinema minstrel shows released recently--this time arranged for the destitute skipper of a showboat. Best shots: a riverboat swinging into a Mississippi wharf; a train racing along the Hudson River.

Burning Up (Paramount). The great difficulty with stories in which sport is used as a background against which a nice fellow and a knave compete for a girl, is that the big horse race, or prize fight, or poker game on which love and honor and the happy ending depend, is hard to photograph. Everything moves wonderfully up to a certain point, but after that one of two things must happen: either the spectator struggles with the technicalities of the selected background, or the director shirks the responsibilities of his climax, brushing through it with a shot of a crowd cheering, or Lord Weatherton putting his bet on Spark Plug, or mechanics pulling the charred body of the villain out of a wrecked plane. In Burning Up, however, the usual situation is reversed. The little triangle, with its hopelessly puerile dialog, has barely enough momentum to suggest a climax until the climax arrives--this time an auto race. The way the race is worked out, to the drone, like the vibration of gigantic, loose 'cello strings, of the little cars, is the only thrill of this typical program picture. Richard Arlen and Mary Brian have the leads. Best shot: poker game in a small-town commercial club.

Second Wife (RKO). This drama becomes pretentious because of the author's obvious attempts to give to a plot dictated by mechanics, the air of an original and unconventional commentary on life. Differently developed and directed, Second Wife might be all that it pretends to be. Its central situation--a conflict between old and new loyalties in the mind of a man who has married twice--is interesting and fairly new to the cinema, but its treatment is routine, its dialog a series of stock company quotations. A little concentration on the material itself could have made more credible the moment when Conrad Nagel, the widower who has married again, has to choose between staying with his second wife who is about to bear a child, or going to the sickbed of his child by the first marriage. In spite of her difficulties, Lila Lee acts competently in the title role. Best shot: a child's reactions to a posthumous birthday present from his dead mother.

When she was 4, Lila Lee appeared in a Gus Edwards show, School Days. At 12 she was taking character parts in cinemas. She was a star before she was 18--her face appeared in advertisements endorsing cold cream, soap, and underwear, and every day hundreds of people wrote to ask for her signature. Then she married and dropped out of pictures. She and her husband put all their money into a ranch in a rich country where it was said to be easy to grow citrus fruit. She had a child. The ranch failed. Lila Lee was penniless when, last year, Bryan Foy, Warner director, invited her to take a voice test. Like several actresses who had lost prestige in silent pictures, she did well for the sound device. Best of her old pictures was Male and Female, best of her new ones Drag.

Cameo Kirby (Fox). Booth Tarkington, who wrote this piece as a serious romance a long time ago, later satirized its genre in an even more successful story, Magnolia. On the screen Cameo Kirby is much funnier than Magnolia and in spite of such inescapably dull elements as J. Harold Murray's baritone repetitions of the theme song and the acting of the heroine, Norma Terris, who cannot act, its unintentional absurdities make it one of the most hilarious burlesques of Mississippi River fiction ever written. In one scene Miss Terris runs down the front steps of her pillared mansion, peers into a closed carriage, staggers, and moans, "He's daid"--an episode from which the audience is forced to infer that the person announcing the suicide of her father has chosen the method of throwing his body into a wagon and bringing it up to the house. Typical line: "Corey? Why, that's Kirby, Cameo Kirby, the man who slew and robbed your father, Miss Randall."

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