The New Pictures

Transatlantic (Fox). What makes this a brilliant picture is the way it has been directed by William K. Howard, onetime Cincinnati theatre manager, law student, sales adviser for Universal, who may be among the ten best directors of next year (see above). The story, which borrows the flashy tricks of Vicki Baum's play Grand Hotel, is a conventional melodrama with plot complications which would have been too numerous had they not been bunched on an ocean liner. Among the passengers on the S.S. Transatlantic are: a banker (John Halliday) scuttling to Europe with his wife (Myrna Loy) and mistress (Greta Nissen); an aged lens-grinder (Jean Hersholt), using all his savings on a holiday for himself and daughter (Lois Moran); a gang of international rogues; and another rogue (Edmund Lowe) who combines the faculties of Robin Hood, Don Quixote and deus ex machina. He forms a liking for the banker's wife, causes her husband to desert his mistress.

Presently the shipboard newsheet reveals to the lens-grinder that his savings are lost in the failure whose consequences the banker is trying to escape. When the banker is shot in his cabin, the bearded lens-grinder goes to the brig. Robin Hood gets him out, not without severe inconvenience to himself. These and subsidiary developments, neatly compacted, gain force from high-paced direction, employment of frequent opportunities for smart photography. Good shots: a gunfight along the seamy rails and ladders of the engine room; a corridor sign flashing "SILENCE" outside the room in which the banker has been shot; the Transatlantic's bow splitting a wave.

Honeymoon Lane (Paramount) owes its existence almost exclusively to Funnyman Eddie Dowling. He wrote it, played it as a musical comedy for 52 weeks, turned it into a cinema leaving out all the songs except Honeymoon Lane. It is a sentimental but engaging work, at times lively with the childish antics of Ray Dooley (Mrs. Eddie Dowling), at times in the nature of a Dowling soliloquy on the virtues of faith and of cherry pie. It relates the adventures of an enterprising youth who, discharged as croupier in the gambling rooms of a resort hotel, becomes manager of a rival boarding-place. Aided by the motherly proprietress, who makes succulent pastries; by her small granddaughter (Ray Dooley) who uses carpet sweepers as roller-skates and is continually scratching herself; and by an itinerant king who happens into the hotel and stays because he likes the pie, Dowling makes his venture a howling success. Subplots concern his romance with the niece of the rival hotelkeeper, the effects of right living on a case-hardened gambler and two thuggish assistants. Far from a great picture, perhaps not even a good one, Honeymoon Lane should continue to enrich its originator, to amuse cinemaddicts who are partial to bromidic comedy. Sample shots: Dowling trying to send a telegram while Ray Dooley kicks his head; the king carrying a suitcase upstairs; the thugs and an aide-de-camp wrestling for a piece of cherry pie.

Eddie Dowling looks a bit like Manhattan's Mayor Jimmy Walker, has the same sort of insistently infectious grin. He, too, interests himself in politics, as active chairman of the New York State Democratic Theatrical League. The Dowling political loyalty perhaps more than the hygienic merits of Honeymoon Lane, caused New York's Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt to wire quotable congratulations after viewing the picture. His able campaigning for Governor Smith and Roosevelt, his huge popularity (particularly among Roman Catholics) caused Funnyman Dowling to be mentioned a year ago as a possible candidate for Governor of Rhode Island, where his parents, named Goucher, christened him Eddie Dowling 36 years ago.

Eddie Dowling had already toured the world as a choir boy when, at 19, he married Ray Dooley, then 14. He became a cabin-boy, newshawk, music-hall singer, customer's man, drama student at Columbia, musicomedy actor. Although he has dropped his last name, he is proud of the supposition that he had pedagogical progenitors, of the fact that his great-grandfather and two great-granduncles founded Goucher College (for women) in Baltimore. Fond of corned-beef, cabbage, good beer and other Irish luxuries, Funnyman Dowling says he would like to be an official in an orphanage so that he could amuse the inmates. He was appalled last spring (TIME, March 9) when National Diversified Co., which financed two of his pictures, was shown to have obtained its funds from fraudulent stock transactions, chiefly at the expense of credulous Catholics. Nicknamed "Dinty," Funnyman Dowling calls his 4-ft.-10-in. wife "Peanut," "Snook," "Brat," considers her "a great artist." She is the only woman whose name has appeared in lights above that of Ziegfeld Follies: Their income, from stage, screen and radio enterprises, is augmented by Funnyman Dowling's holdings in a Pasadena, Calif. sausage factory.

The Star Witness (Warner). Seven members of a middle class family, accidentally present when a gangster kills a policeman, are terrorized by the gangster's subordinates to dissuade them from giving evidence against the murderer. First the gangsters kidnap and beat the father. Then they kidnap and prepare to despatch his urchin son. Finally, a spry, flask-nipping, Civil War veteran grandfather (Chic Sale) rescues the urchin. He wobbles into court munching his whiskers and ready to give the district attorney (Walter Huston) a star witness.

Warner executives were giving their final approval to this gruesome but improving homily when, last week, in a Manhattan thoroughfare, erratic bullets from real gangsters' guns killed one and wounded four other urchins (see p. 14). Quick to evaluate a somewhat far fetched parallel between this tragedy and the plot of The Star Witness, Warner executives hurried the premiere of the picture, advertised it as "a weapon . . . to stamp out . . . gangsters and their illicit breed," devoted the proceeds of the first showing to the families of Manhattan's small victims.

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