The New Pictures

Shanghai Express (Paramount). The scene wherein the heroine feels called upon to sacrifice her honor to the villain in order to save the man she loves has occurred so frequently in the cinema that it can be regarded as a more rigid pillar of the industry than Mr. Zukor, Mr. Lasky or Mr. Hertz. But Shanghai Express is" a picture of the new school, and when Marlene Dietrich promises Warner Oland to visit him at his castle if he will refrain from destroying Clive Brook's eyesight with a red hot poker, you will not find the situation banal.

Marlene Dietrich is a heroine of the contemporary order, a "coaster" (poule de luxe) of the Chinese shoreline. The other characters are a group of the ill-assorted personages customarily assembled for "one location" stories--a sour-tongued missionary, an old lady with a lapdog, a U. S. gambler, a German opium dealer who seems to suffer from chilblains, an oriental trollop, a half-breed Chinese named Henry Chang, a British Army surgeon with an Addisonian turn of speech. In the up-to-date habit of Transatlantic, Union Depot and Grand Hotel, they are all inhabiting a train of luxurious Pullmans bound from Peiping to Shanghai. When the train stops at a way station, Henry Chang turns out to be a revolutionary general. He holds the surgeon as a hostage and is about to mutilate him for being rude when the "coaster" makes her proposition. She has known the surgeon intimately in the distant past, and having met him again is hoping to reform for his sake, but ready not to do so if this will benefit him more. Fortunately, Mr. Chang (Warner Oland) has behaved badly toward the Chinese trollop (Anna May Wong), who solves the dilemma by planting a dagger in his back.

The atmosphere which Director von Sternberg cleverly built up through the slow beginning of the picture and the brilliant photographic effects achieved by his camera man, Lee Garmes, have effect of giving this melodramatic cliche a reality which it could not possibly achieve in a medium less persuasive than the cinema. Because the cars, the engines, the soldiers, the flags and noises of cities through which the Shanghai express passes are thoroughly realistic, the villainies of Mr. Chang and even the curiously elaborate speeches written for Clive Brook seem real also. Miss Dietrich's legs are not so evident as usual and she acts well in the manner of a less stoic Garbo. The wars to which the picture alludes are the civil disturbances which raged in China early last year; but, alert to the advantages of the Sino-Japanese conflict, Paramount last week urged exhibitors to believe that "every newspaper in the world is a pressbook for Shanghai Express."

Constance Bennett is 26, blonde, 105 lb., married (to the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye). Her adopted son (Peter, offspring of a cousin), is three. She has blue eyes and is one inch taller than

Joan Bennett, who is 21, blonde, green-eyed, 110 lb., 5 ft. 3 in., divorced (from John Martin Fox, son of a Seattle lumberman), has a three-year-old daughter named Adrienne.

Constance, who returned to talkies after being in silent pictures before her second marriage (to Philip Plant), works for RKO at a reputed salary of $22,500 a week. She is noted, in the cinema, for 1) extraordinary ability to wear clothes, 2) a figure suitable for her forte, 3) a cultivated accent, 4) a habit of suffering pleasantly in luxurious surroundings. She has protruding shoulder blades, a becoming air of sophistication.

Joan, comparatively unseasoned, went to Hollywood two years ago, works for Fox at a reputed salary of $5,000 a week.

She is not yet identified with a particular kind of role. She has a small round face, an air of petulant but yielding naivete.

Both are daughters of famed Actor Richard Bennett and Adrienne Morrison, onetime actress who now runs a children's theatre in Manhattan. Both are sisters-in-law of Crooner Morton Downey, who married their sister Barbara Bennett, who is older than Joan, younger than Constance. Both were schooled in Manhattan, finished in Paris, taught not to like acting. Both last week appeared in new pictures, as follows:

She Wanted a Millionaire (Fox) shows Joan Bennett in the kind of picture which Constance specialized in a year ago. She is beautifully dressed, but unhappily married to a jealous and lustful sadist (James Kirkwood) who keeps a pack of hounds for strange purposes. Earlier in the picture, which starts out by mocking such carnivals in light-hearted style, she has been declared winner of an Atlantic City Beauty Contest.

As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it is an adaption of the Nixon-Nirdlinger romance, which last year ended in widely publicized murder on the Riviera. Least convincing crises of the story are those which most closely approximate the bizarre realities of its derivation. When Joan suggests a divorce, her sadist carries her toward his kennels, licking his chops in an unpleasant way. A murder has to be committed and when this has been attended to, by a slobbering retainer whom the sadist employs to be the target of his insults, Joan, fatigued with millionaires, seems likely to take up with a locomotive engineer (Spencer Tracy). She Wanted a Millionaire is handicapped by the timid sensationalism with which Hollywood is forced to treat sexual irregularity.

Lady with a Past (RKO). Like her small sister in She Wanted a Millionaire, Constance Bennett in this picture is an American girl who has adventures in France. She, too, is seen wearing fine feathers and patronizing Parisian cafes while trying to straighten out her romantic uncertainties, but in other respects the pictures are dissimilar. Constance, far from being the finalist in a beauty contest, is a girl of high degree who has found that the men she admires are unsusceptible to her charms. To make herself more desirable, she sets out to acquire a past, aided by a flip gigolo (Ben Lyon) and an elderly fortune hunter (Albert Conti), who commits suicide when she declines his offer of marriage. Returned to the U. S., she finds that her subterfuges, though a shade more extreme than she had intended them to be, have answered their purpose. A bleak young man of fashion (David Manners) rebukes her at a dance and follows her eagerly into the street when she leaves, as she had hoped he would. Good shot: Constance Bennett falling fast asleep in a cafe and dreaming that her gigolo has become overenthusiastic about his duties.

Lovers Courageous (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), although it was written as a cinema, not as a stage play, by famed Playwright Frederick Lonsdale, has most of the qualities which are noticeable in adaptations of stage comedies. Its unusual charm springs partly from Lonsdale's gracious dialog and partly from the fact that the cast is about the best that Hollywood could assemble for this type of production. Reginald Owen is a sporting Earl, absurdly preoccupied with the nonsensical problems of barnyard and hunting field. Frederick Kerr is a superannuated British admiral, grunting pungent insults at the members of his family. Roland Young is a self-satisfied naval officer who has a fussy curiosity about the domestic affairs of his friends. It is characters like these--minor personages, sketched with a caricaturist's regard for mannerism and eccentricity--that really make Lonsdale's plays amusing, but he usually manages to think up a fairly entertaining story to go with them. This time it is about a scapegrace adventurer (Robert Montgomery) and the admiral's daughter (Madge Evans), whom he marries after meeting her in the store where he is a tobacco salesman. To arrange a felicitous denouement, Lonsdale has his hero write a play which, if it is anything like Lovers Courageous, is skilful, insignificant, likeable. Good shot: Montgomery and Evans eating their dinner--a steak, which Montgomery particularly enjoys because he thinks he has successfully concealed the fact that it was stolen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.