The New Pictures

One Heavenly Night (Goldwyn). The combined talents of Authors Louis Bromfield and Sidney Howard, both raucously advertised as Pulitzer Prizewinners, have produced a story which will make cinema seers feel content that winners of the Nobel and other awards have not so far been hired to compose operettas. It is about a flower girl who, masquerading as a notorious cabaret entertainer, wins the love of John Boles. The singer (Lilyan Tashman) has been exiled by the police from Budapest to the familiar Hungarian musical comedy steppes--a district of palaces, vineyards, and extemporary duets. Going as substitute, the flower girl is wooed by an important local grandee who judges her character by what he has heard about Miss Tashman. Evelyn Laye is the heroine. She is a slender blonde Englishwoman who won fame last year in the stage musicomedy, Bitter Sweet. She sings and acts nicely, and though the whole production lacks distinction it is handsomely staged and cast and embellished with the folding leg and funny face of Comedian Leon Errol. Best shot: Errol posting a letter. Silliest shot: Laye and Boles singing lyrics to each other out of doors in the rain.

Evelyn Laye was never called the most beautiful woman in England until she was on Broadway, New York. Like many successful contemporary stage and cinema stars, she was born of actor parents. Her parents were touring in Charley's Aunt when she made her first appearances at the age of two. As manager of the Palace Theatre in Brighton, her father wrote popular songs that never became popular and got his eleven-year-old daughter to try them out. Later Evelyn Laye toured England in musical shows. Last summer she divorced Sonny Hale, actor. She keeps slim by taking a long walk every day and believes that people should have their fun while they are young. She dislikes stuffy theatres, sometimes orders the heat turned off before she will sing. She says of U. S. shoes ". . . the best in the world. They fit."

The Criminal Code (Columbia). Aside from its high value as entertainment, this is a significant picture because it is in every way better than the Manhattan stage hit, acclaimed by critics, from which it is taken. It will also provide, for those who saw the play last year, illustration of the differences between theatrical and cinema technique when each is properly handled. On the stage The Criminal Code was a parable. The misfortunes heaped on the protagonist--a boy who learns in prison how to be a criminal-- were fashioned to provide a lesson. As a cinema, the realism of scenes in the prison itself--the cells, yard, jute-mill, dungeons --pours life into the theatrical skeleton. Even the romance between Robert Graham and the warden's daughter (Constance Cummings) is not as absurd as it might have been and at no time does The Criminal Code rely for its effect on vaudeville gag-lines, as The Big House did. Walter Huston plays the warden humanly and sensibly, although at times he has trouble making the dialog sound real. Best minor part: DeWitt Jennings as an extremely cruel guard.

Al-Yemen (Amkino). This is an example of an elementary and important use of the camera too rarely attempted by U. S. producers: straightforward reporting. It is not a thrilling picture; it is interesting--a description of life in an independent state in the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula. It was made by representatives of the German and Soviet governments on a special expedition.

The camera's versatility in angles and colors is neglected, but the pictures tell in quiet and graphic prose about the little fishing villages flattened on the edge of the Red Sea; pelicans floating like foam-patches in the nervous water; skinny brown fishermen bringing in their shallow boats, piled with the flashing, heavy silver bodies of fish. You can smell the hot breath of Sanaa, see its turbaned merchants, Jewish watchmakers, fleabitten curs, and bearded princes. Al-Yemen reproduces a life apparently contemporaneous with the events described in the New Testament, but having no connection with them. Best shot: Hodeda's ship-bristling harbor.

Little Caesar (First National). Undoubtedly the most familiar of current screen figures is the fearless, ambitious gangster who becomes rich on the fruits of evil and dies in the last reel in a heroic manner. With less adroit handling Little Caesar might easily have been no more than a fair program picture and its central character merely a reflection of his many forerunners. Instead, Actor Edward G. Robinson has made his role the supreme embodiment of a type. He is helped by Mervyn Leroy's fine directing and by the fact that W. R. Burnett's story was comprehensive, telling the whole of the gangster's life. You see Little Caesar starting in business as a low-grade stickup man whose specialty is robbing gasoline stations. He works his way up step by step in the outlaw gang-civilization of a big city. Only one man, the mysterious "Big Boy" is higher than he when his luck changes. He loses his power, his money, becomes a flophouse derelict, and finally dies behind a billboard, chewed by bullets from a policeman's machine-gun. Actor Robinson makes Little Caesar far more complete than Author Burnett saw him-- a gangster of Greek tragedy, destroyed by the fates within him. The only miscast character is Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a tough Italian thug. Best shot: Caesar's mob raiding a cabaret protected by a rival gang.

Mervyn Leroy, 30, is one of those young men who have worked up through technical and executive jobs in a way far more sensational although less publicized than the familiar path to stardom of actors and actresses. Hollywood has long heard the rumor that his real name is Lasky but that he changed it because he did not want a lift into the saddle from the prestige of his famed uncle Jesse Lasky. As Leroy, after some years in vaudeville and stock companies, he turned up in 1920 as a cameraman for First National. Later he became gagman for Colleen Moore. John McCormick, then Miss Moore's husband, took a fancy to the assured manner and snarling wit of this short, stocky gagster who slouched about the lot, smoking with the belligerent air of a small man an enormous, habitual cigar. Mervyn Leroy became a director with Colleen Moore's unit, rose rapidly. Now one of the ringmasters for whom stars, better known though paid less than he, must go through their paces, he has directed Little Johnny Jones, Playing Around, Broadway Babies, Showgirl in Hollywood, Numbered Men, The Gorilla.

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