The New Pictures

The Road to Singapore (Warner) is an underweight drama of the tropics, showing a cynical but maligned roue (William Powell) gracefully attaching the wife (Doris Kenyon) of a colonial doctor whose headgear alone would almost have been grounds for desertion. Derived from a briefly exhibited drama called Heat Wave, the picture shows its hero bearing the white man's burden with superfluous fortitude and increasing its weight by disguising his nobility with sophomoric sarcasm. Touted as a ladies' man because he once acted as co-respondent in divorce proceedings, he is pestered by the habitues of an insular country club in the Far East. The males suspect him of a willingness to make free with their wives and daughters, a suspicion which the wives and daughters gleefully share. Finally the hero lives up to his reputation, with the doctor's wife. The inference is that they elope toward Singapore.

When Warner Bros, persuaded three actors * to leave Paramount this year, surprise was voiced in Hollywood. The Road to Singapore can best be regarded as a testimonial to the merits of a less acquisitive policy. It is possibly William Powell's worst picture and far below the standard which Warner Bros, have announced their intention to maintain by adopting a smaller and more select production schedule (TIME, Sept. 20). Powell, identified with less lush impersonations at Paramount, seems vapid by contrast in this picture although his mannerisms are less noxious than those of Basil Rathbone, who played the role on the stage. Doris Kenyon, who is now no older in appearance than when she was an actress in silent cinemas years ago, helps out. But the real trouble lies in a story untrue to everything except a pattern which went out when third-rate writers stopped imitating Kipling. Typical shots: William Powell sneering at a young girl; leering at the doctor with whose wife he plans an escapade.

Devotion (RKO Pathe) is far from being a significant picture nor did it deserve the battery of skyscraping searchlights which it received at its premiere in Hollywood. It is, however, a wholly engaging trifle of sentimental comedy, lightened and made to sparkle by the acting of Ann Harding and Leslie Howard, whose slow progress toward cinematic celebrity is a reflection on his employers. The story is a revised version of the Cinderella legend concerning a girl whose parents have overlooked her charms. To attract the attention of a young barrister, the girl is forced to accept employment as nursery governess to his son. Disguised in spectacles, wig, puff-sleeves and a cockney accent, she interrupts the barrister (Leslie Howard) to bring him cups of tea and bouillon. It takes him a long time to penetrate her hoax and when he does so he is nearly deprived of his reward by one of his clients who has been more perceptive. All this is as innocuous as it sounds, but more amusing. Good shots: Leslie Howard going to bed, on orders from his son's nursemaid; Ann Harding having her portrait painted by an artist who knows she is not really a governess and who knows she knows he knows it.

Ann Harding's most impressive qualification as a cinemactress is not her hair, which appears almost ivory-colored in photographs and which she wears in an extraordinary style, but her voice. Its soft, low timbre and sympathetic intonations survive almost perfectly the trying process of mechanical reproduction. Cinemactress Harding is glad she worked as a private secretary in the Manhattan offices of Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. She trained herself to enunciate perfectly so that dictaphone records of letters which she relayed to typists would not, like those of her colleagues, be blurred and unintelligible. She gave up her job to act with the Provincetown Players. After experience in stock companies, she got the lead role in The Trial of Mary Dugan. Her first picture, Paris Bound, was an immediate, brilliant success. Now she has a $6,000-a-week contract, is the only cinemactress in Hollywood who has had three of her pictures given what are known as "gala world premieres." For her birthday two months ago, her husband, Cinemactor Harry Bannister, gave her a $35,000 play house which contains a gymnasium, tennis court, bowling alley, cinema theatre with 40 seats. In addition to tennis and bowling, Cinemactress Harding likes avocadoes, Donn Byrne's novels, Persian cats. She thinks she would rather write plays than act in them. Her father, Col. George G. Gatley, a West Point graduate in 1890. strenuously objected to her stage & cinema career. They were not reconciled until a few months before his death in January.

24 Hours (Paramount). It is a familiar but extraordinary fact that mediocre novels often make the most acceptable plays. Likewise, mediocre novels and plays often make the best cinemas. A fair example is 24 Hours. Louis Bromfield's book receives substance in the cinema. Its overtheatrical characters, given faces, bodies, legs and voices, cease being utterly unreal and their problems serve some purpose beyond boiling an author's pot.

The outline of the story is garish. It begins when a glum socialite (Clive Brook), consoling himself with liquor for his wife's infidelities, conceives an alliance with a cabaret singer (Miriam Hopkins). The cabaret singer has bad associations. When she sings the blues, she means them. Her husband is a thief. One night the socialite goes home to her apartment. While he is resting in a stupor on her couch her husband creeps into the other room of the apartment and kills her. The socialite is temporarily held for the murder. A fingerprint on a whiskey bottle exonerates him. He sails for Europe, reconciled with his wife (Kay Francis) and determined to stop guzzling.

Marion Gering's direction moves the story along fast without hurrying it, borrows the advantages of a close temporal unity without making it seem tricky by overemphasis. Clive Brook, Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins give well-toned performances. Miriam Hopkins has two torch or porch songs, sings them with the right professional air. Good shot: Clive Brook, preoccupied by his troubles, saying good night to a saloon proprietor. Bad shot: Kay Francis deciding to take what she calls "the thoroughbred way."

Sob Sister (Fox) had a good director, Alfred Santell (Daddy Long Legs); a brilliant dialogist, Edwin Burke (Bad Girl) ; two able principals, Linda Watkins, recruit from the Manhattan stage who caused a rumpus among Hollywood press-agents when she failed to be elected a "Wampas Baby Star of 1931," and James Dunn, who gave a fine performance in Bad Girl. All of which makes it disappointing that Sob Sister emerges as a routine, though fairly lively, drama dedicated to the stale proposition that newshawks are animated by semi-religious loyalty to their employers.

The girl in the picture insistently scoops another reporter with whom she is in love. He knows her tendencies so well that, when bits of a dead man's diary disappear from his room and reappear on the front page of a tabloid, he suspects her of stealing them. When murderous kidnappers capture the heroine, the picture blazes into melodrama that does not subside till bevies of police have secured her release. The final shot is typical: Linda Watkins excusing herself from the table at which she is lunching with James Dunn in order to telephone an incredibly elliptical summary of her adventures to a rewrite man.

* The three were William Powell, Kay Francis and Ruth Chatterton. Most raucous was Paramount's excitement over losing Miss Chatterton. Warner Bros, were several times rumored to be ready to give her back but last week Cinemactress Chatterton was busy with her last Paramount picture (Tomorrow & Tomorrow), planned to begin work for Warner Bros, on Nov. 1.

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