The New Pictures

The Millionaire (Warner). There is nothing spectacular about this picture except that George Arliss the Great, hitherto always decked out in fancy dress for the cinema, wears plain clothes through it all and even--a good deal of the time--overalls. It is still nothing much, only a story about a millionaire whose doctor makes him retire from his business, the manufacture of automobiles, and go to California to rest. Idleness makes him sick, so he sneaks out of his fine house and, under an assumed name, buys a half interest in a filling station. He goes to work at the filling station every day and when he comes home he hides his overalls, tells lies about where he has been. In the end he beats out the man who runs the filling station across the street. His partner marries his daughter. Quietly literate dialog by Booth Tarkington helps the effect, but it is always Arliss who gives the little picture distinction. He finds many things to do that make moments and the character come alive: mummery with the medicine, which he carefully measures out. and then throws through the window; his manner with his young partner (David Manners) whom he promotes as a suitor for his daughter by pretending, with his wife, to oppose him; little bits of business to express an old man's eccentric love of the spectacular. It is a picture unremarkable except that it is perfectly done and that it possesses a quality rare in cinema products, the quality of charm. Typical shot: George Arliss filling his wife's car with gas, and making it funny.

Strangers May Kiss (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This is one of those handsomely staged, well-acted, rather silly productions which confound critics who try to reveal their silliness. The story is by Ursula Parrott, author of famed Ex-Wife; it will probably gross several million dollars. Norma Shearer is a working girl who says, "A girl may kiss and ride on as well as any man." Yet when Neil Hamilton, her journalist lover, companion of an illicit weekend in Mexico, says a casual goodbye to her, she is seen in one of those rapid sequences indicating a shattering of feminine morale--broken scenes in which Miss Shearer dances in the arms of successive admirers, always to the accompaniment of a shrill, annoying laughter that is the keynote of the picture. The dialog is wretched. Most tiresome shot: Robert Montgomery's half-filled cocktail glass.

Beyond Victory (RKO Pathe). The spirit of a masterpiece can be reflected more easily than its technique and it is the spirit of All Quiet on the Western Front that animates this little war story. Three years ago war would have been glorified in such a piece of cinema trade-goods as this, even if it were glorified only as a background for heroic actions; now war is presented simply to be pilloried. The framework--four men assigned to hold the enemy in a beleaguered post while the main body of troops retires--has possibilities. Each man, faced with almost certain death, tells how he came to go to war. But things get started too slowly. Several dozen U.S. flags, tons of dynamite, miles of barbed wire, thousands of tin hats, intended to galvanize the horror into realistic terms, merely become constituents as familiar and therefore as unnoticeable as the advertisements for grain and hardware, on the backdrops of rural vaudeville houses. Best sequences: James Gleason, henpecked husband of a knife-thrower, telling why he went to war.

Cracked Nuts (Radio). This is a nonsense comedy of which the humor, if any, depends on seeing Edna May Oliver, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey go through their routines on the same set. The plot is a contest between Wheeler and Woolsey for the mythical kingdom of Eldorania which Woolsey believes he owns because he won it in a crap game with a former ruler, and which Wheeler claims because he bought an Eldoranian revolution for $100,000. Unfortunately such gags as the long dialog in which the word "well," used as an interjection, is dragged through every possible shade of meaning, and the scene where Wheeler and Woolsey come through an airplane bombing with most of their clothes torn off, were not good even when they were new.

A Connecticut Yankee (Fox). Mark Twain's story was made into an effective farce in silent cinema days, starring Harry Myers; then it became a successful musi-comedy. But not until its present metamorphosis into a talking picture has a form been reached in which the many-faceted material is properly displayed. Few creative works are translatable from one medium to another, but A Connecticut Yankee is no less trenchant as a picture than as a novel; it is wonderful entertainment, rippling with chuckles, expanding often into resonant Twainian belly-laughs. Director David Butler has omitted the sociological satire of the novel. He has concentrated on the humor of anachronism and made a thorough job of it. His method is not subtle, but the book is not either, and the picture is just as funny as the book.

The old outline has been preserved: the Yankee finds his dream is real, he is at the Court of the Round Table, and he amazes King Arthur by causing the sun to become dark on the day he is to be executed, a feat which he announces after consulting his pocket almanac. The Yankee organizes factories in which modern appliances are turned out for the use of medieval people and sends the knights out riding with sandwich boards slung over their armor advertising corn cure, liver pills. fountain pens.

The producers have not cabined themselves by letter-reverence to the script. They have gone on inventing, adding to the details of the fantasy, just as Mark Twain would have delighted in doing: the knights storming the castle of Queen Morgan Le Fay use submachine guns and ride in Austin cars; an autogiro arrives to rescue King Arthur; the tilt between Sir Boss (Will Rogers) and Sir Sagramor is an nounced in the manner of the modern prize-ring and broadcast by a whiskered radio man who begins McNamically: "Well, here we are at .Camelot. . . ." In this tilt Will Rogers, on a cow-pony, cuts figures around the knight on his lumbering charger and finally yanks him off with a rope and drags him round the field as western ranchers used to drag a horse-thief when they caught one. Will Rogers' deliberate awkwardness, his sham ble, mock shyness and ability on horse back, are all ideal for the role, and it does not matter that his drawl is Oklahoma in stead of Connecticut. His personality and his multifarious activities have made him by this time, even to Americans, a figure symbolic of American ism. Next best part : dignified old William Farnum, the hero of many a two-fisted thriller some ten years ago, as King Arthur.

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