The New Pictures

The Champ (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) will probably extract more tears than any other cinema made in 1931, with the possible exception of The Sin of Madelon Claudet (TIME, Nov. 9). It is about a broken-down pugilist (Wallace Beery) and his ragamuffin son (Jackie Cooper). There is really only one situation--Jackie Cooper struggling to go on worshiping his father in the face of Beery's unworthy behavior (guzzling, crap-shooting, brawling in bad company) and Beery, shamed at his shiftlessness, struggling to preserve his son's loyalty. Every time Beery gets drunk, gambles away the racehorse which he has presented to his son, or is taken to jail for disturbing the peace, there is a shot of little Cooper sticking out his underlip and wrinkling his eyes. In jail, Beery decides to send his son to live in respectable surroundings with his mother. Cooper is unwilling to go. To make him less unwilling, Beery gives him a blow across the face, then smashes his own hand against the side of his cell. Even this mistreatment does not discourage little Cooper. Presently he is back, muttering, "Aw gee!" with sniveling, or sometimes gay, affection. Finally there arrives Beery's comeback as a fighter. He shuffles into the ring in a torn bathrobe, defeats what is supposed to be a first-class boxer in a struggle which will seem a little absurd to anyone who has ever seen a prizefight. After the fight, he has heart-failure; little Cooper's underlip comes out again.

The stencilled plot of The Champ might not have tempted many of Hollywood's directors, but it was rich to the taste of Director King Vidor. Far from being ashamed of such an unblushing tearjerker, he laid on pathos with a steam-shovel. Big, ugly, shambling Beery did likewise and little Cooper, whose salary for such undertakings is $1,500 a week, gave a thoroughgoing performance in the same key. Utterly false and thoroughly convincing, The Champ is a monument to the cinema's skill in achieving second-rate perfection. Good shots: Beery dressing when he has a horrible hangover; Cooper listening while his nice little half-sister tells him a fairy story about a Princess who slept for 1,000 years.

Are These Our Children? (RKO-Radio). "Children have no inhibitions or false ideas and people over 50 are usually sensible enough to have dropped them. ... I think if a picture or play was produced with only children ... or oldsters ... in the cast, it would be the surest safeguard . . . against the critics. . . ." So says seasoned Marie Dressier. Director Wesley Ruggles (Cimarron) shares her respect for young actors. In Are These Our Children? which he wrote himself, he takes a cast mostly under 18, guides them through a depressing epic of juvenile delinquency which ends at the electric chair. His story corresponds roughly to the one which any newsreader detects between the lines of items concerning adolescent bandits, schoolboy murderers and other such. It tells about a boy (Eric Linden) who, failing to win a high-school prize for oratory, takes up with bad companions, patronizes dance halls and chop-suey dens. While drunk he kills a friendly old delicatessen dealer. At the trial he dramatizes his predicament, undertakes to conduct the defense of himself & accomplices. He repents, too late, when he has been sentenced to death. Good shot: Eric Linden borrowing a dime from the prison attendant to give his small brother when he says goodbye.

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