The New Pictures

The Public Enemy (Warner). Director at an executive meeting: "I've got an inspiration. Well make an African picture. Something new. Go right into the interior and use natives for actors. Nothing like Trader Horn. This one's going to be different. Now what will we call it. Trader what?"

With that anecdote current last week in the film industry, critics wondered if an executive had asserted that The Public Enemy was not going to be anything like Little Caesar. In detail The Public Enemy is nothing like that most successful of gangster pictures, but its central idea is identical--dissection of the criminal mind by reconstruction of one criminal's career. You see James Cagney as a tough boy led into petty thieving. He moves higher, into the bigger business of robbing storage lofts. He rises to become an outstanding rumrunner and a journeyman of homicide until his bullet-spattered body is dumped in front of his mother's house. His more sentimental pal, Edward Woods, provides a milder development of the same theme. The Public Enemy is well-told and its intensity is relieved by scenes of the central characters slugging bartenders and slapping their women across the face. U. S. audiences, long trained by the Press to glorify thugs, last week laughed loudly at such comedy and sat spellbound through the serious parts. Unlike City Streets (TIME, April 27), this is not a Hugoesque fable of gangsters fighting among themselves, but a documentary drama of the bandit standing against society. It carries to its ultimate absurdity the fashion for romanticizing gangsters, for even in defeat the public enemy is endowed with grandeur. Best shot: two young gangsters scared to death on their first "job."

Dude Ranch (Paramount). Jack Oakie, Eugene Pallette, Stuart Erwin and Mitzi Green have an hour of good fun in a comedy which is partly a satire on westerns, partly a melodrama in its own right. The idea is one of those really comic inspirations whose single disadvantage is that they can never be made quite as funny as their intention. Bored guests, feeling that frontier atmosphere has become effete, are about to leave the dude ranch when the proprietor hires a troupe of vagrant actors to provide glimpses of primitive life. They stage a melodrama in the lobby in which the business of "unhand that woman" and "the viper beats my mother" is used with proper gusto. Genuine bank-robbers bring excitement to the closing sequences, in which Oakie proves that his heroism is more than histrionic. Typical shot: Pallette, as a pseudo-Sioux chief, trying to understand why, if a girl is Sue (Sioux) her father is not Sioux also.

Born to Love (RKO Pathe). In this one Constance Bennett suffers, loves, and suffers. In an emotional moment during the War she has a love affair with a U. S. captain. When she meets and marries a handsome English toff he passes the captain's baby off as his own, retaining custody of it after they are divorced. Miss Bennett suffers in marriage with him, suffers when separated from her child, suffers when she must live in poverty and not even see her old sweetheart for fear Sir Wilfred Drake (Paul Cavanaugh) will hear of it and continue his refusal to let her see the baby. But the most awful moment of suffering takes place when, permitted to see the baby for the first time in two years, she arrives at the house just after it has died. Paul Stein has put in some thoughtful directorial touches--the lovers talking in bed in a scene in which you see only the wall which they must see from the head of the bed; the Zeppelin raid on London with the sirens hooting and fast cars placarded TAKE COVER roaring through the streets; the scene-- presented entirely in shadow silhouet, from the doorway of the room--in which Miss Bennett finds her baby dead. But as an emotional actress Constance Bennett is still merely a big-eyed young woman with a husky, well-schooled voice, who wears clothes nicely and is well-poised at all times. Best shot: a London cabby, hearing the sirens, solemnly jumping off the box and running into a cellar.

Doctors' Wives (Fox). There is a good idea in Doctors' Wives, some passable acting, and one splendid sequence in an operating theatre. There is in it also a good solid dose of dramatic hokum and Warner Baxter's eyebrow mustache, an adornment which does not seem to become an eminent surgeon. The idea is that doctors' wives are jealous of their husbands' time and suspicious of their chances for intimate propinquity to attractive women. For Joan Bennett, daughter of a doctor, and married to the doctor (Baxter) who was called to her father's deathbed, trouble begins on her wedding night when her bridegroom has to hurry out to a patient. After a scene in, which his faithlessness is apparently proven, she leaves him, runs to the arms of still another doctor. The scene in the operating theatre comes when Baxter, with his wife as one of the attendant nurses, operates on her lover. The situation is farfetched; not so the graphic hospital scenes.

A Tailor Made Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). William Haines is one of those actors who have committed themselves to a specialty and are obliged to stick to it. The story, selected because it was in the Haines formula, is the old one about the pants presser who starts on his way to success by stealing a customer's dress suit and wearing it to a party. He is in love with his boss's daughter, Dorothy Jordan. When he has abruptly achieved eminence as manager of a department store, a job given him by a millionaire whom his social graces have captivated, matrons seek him as a husband for their debutante daughters, causing complications. Except for the fact that it is a talkie, and for some faintly amusing scenes at the party, A Tailor Made Man would appear to have been produced in 1915 or previously. Haines's impudence is more offensive than engaging, his triumphs are too easy, the dialog is badly stilted. Most gratifying shot: the master tailor dumping a bucketful of water on Haines from a second-story window.

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