The New Pictures

Congorilla (Fox) is noteworthy as the first African jungle talking picture. Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson have recorded pygmy dialects and drums, the yapping of wild dogs, the yawning of hippopotamuses, lions' rare roars, the whooshing of thousands of flamingo wings, the slithering of crocodiles along wet rocks, the Martin Johnsons' phonograph playing jazz. There is little pretense of danger. Audiences still shift in their seats when two tons of horny rhinoceros rush at the camera, but the statistical safety of the man or woman with the gun makes the thrill meretricious. More valid is the leisurely charm of the studies of the pygmies, the hippopotamuses, the waterhole. Five minutes of rare comedy are developed from nothing but two pygmies' attempt to light a cigar. Probably anyone with the fare could have taken a sound camera along the main highways of African hunting country, but Martin & Osa Johnson did it first.

Igloo (Universal) is the latest of many epics showing the prolonged death-grip of Man and remorseless Nature. Nanook of the North did it in 1922. Grass did it in 1925 for the nomads of central Asia, The Silent Enemy for the Amerindian in 1930. Grass was a symphonic study in time, space, herds and mountains. The Silent Enemy used a plot, a love triangle. Igloo follows the evolved formula of love against a landscape. Otherwise it is an unrelieved stagger through snow & ice.

It is laid north of Point Barrow, Alaska. Chee-Ak comes courting Kyatuk as winter seems to break. The sanguine tribesmen have a food orgy. They are stupefied with blubber when winter suddenly closes in again. As the polar storm screams monotonously Chee-Ak suggests that they starve afoot. According to tribal routine they seal the aged into their igloos to die. Kyatuk's father is so left but Kyatuk protests. Chee-Ak backs her up. The tribe's offended gods dog the march with bad luck, nearly crushing them all in the polar icepack, until Kyatuk's father is drowned. At once they find and kill seal and walrus, watch the thick blood bubble, rejoice for the Spring.

Despite occasional dramatic refinements that tend to discredit the entire picture, Igloo is well done. Good shots: the company of walruses inching off the ice floe; Eskimos kicking a snowball back & forth with their insteps; a whale whamming its tail out of water; a polar bear shuffling over the ice.

Madame Racketeer (Paramount) is a female version of Cracksman Jimmy Valentine in the small town. Alison Skipworth is the grizzled old grifter with formidable dimples. She is the long-forgotten wife of a provincial hotelkeeper (Richard Bennett) and the mother of his two daughters. A rolling stone, she comes back to the starting line for moss, incognito except to her husband. But for $20 she swindled out of the warden as she was leaving her latest penitentiary she is penniless, but she caracoles into town as the Countess of Auburn. She finds one daughter's marriage being blocked by the town banker. She asks him to draw up a codicil to her will, leaving the girl an imaginary fortune. That fixes that. She finds the other daughter in love with a lurking gangster. She tries to fix that too. At the same time she arranges a combination swindle and blackmail scheme against the town banker. When she goes back to the penitentiary to save her daughter from the gangster, she does it with a calloused resignation that makes her less the mother than the moll. Good scene: Alison Skipworth showing her autograph album with the two entries: "Prosperity, Herb" (says she: "That was before he was elected") and "'India Is Yours, Gandhi."

Alison Mary Elliott Margaret Markham-Skipworth, 57, is Hollywood's most reliable grande dame or "high class wicked woman." At 20 she was the wife of artist Frank Markham-Skipworth and starving in London. "To keep from starving" she took a part as understudy to Marie Tempest in The Artist's Model, nine months later was playing the lead in Manhattan. She once paid Douglas Fairbanks Sr. $40 a week as a juvenile. She has owned a chicken farm on Long Island for 28 years, will some day retire to it.

The Age of Consent (RKO) is a serious cinema of college love. Richard Cromwell quarrels with his sweetheart, Dorothy Wilson, later apologizes and is forgiven, proposes marriage. She tells him to finish his remaining two years in college. After a spinster teacher tells her how she once was similarly magnanimous, Dorothy changes her mind, telephones Richard. But he is compromising himself with a waitress, Arlene Judge, who presently gets her father and demands marriage. Dorothy Wilson consoles herself by a ride in the snappy car of Eric Linden, a smart-cracking admirer. They turn over, Linden is mortally injured. Dorothy Wilson's injuries are bad enough to make Arlene Judge relent when she-sees the reunion of Wilson & Cromwell. Notably absent from The Age of Consent are football games, cheers, banners. There is only one gin party.

Jewel Robbery (Warner Bros.) recommends to tycoons' velvet-cased wives and to wellspoken jewel robbers that they get together. Kay Francis is a Viennese who has a husband and a lover but is looking for a Man. She identifies herself as "shallow and weak" but a Woman. After a romp in a morning bath three feet deep in suds, a relay encased in towels from maid to maid, a gradual insinuation into the usual clothing and some gay prattle with a friend, Kay Francis toward evening goes to a jewel shop with husband, lover and friend. She meets the king of the jewel thieves (William Powell) engaged in cleaning out the store. Between the two expensive parasites love burgeons. Says Kay Francis later: "As I saw him go about his business, I realized what a high civilization we have in Europe. He stormed that shop like a hewo." The picture wavers between light comedy and farce, William Powell straining toward the first, Kay Francis relaxing in the second. The jewel thief's pack of cigarets, a few puffs of which make the smoker idiotic, fall into the hands of the police with moderately comic results. Powell invades Francis' house for a midnight call and more light comedy. The police raid farcically and in the same vein Powell does a bit of broken field running through the massed forces of the law. Powell's gestures seem modeled on those of a stage tumbler. He frequently washes his hands in air, as though drying them on an imaginary handkerchief. He clicks his heels and bows from the waist. All this is apparently to indicate a "high state of civilization in Europe." The conversation reaches what is intended as a climax in his account of a woman he robbed: "The lady stood beside me. The Prince of Wales was announced. I could have removed her dress."

Roar of the Dragon (RKO) is a cinema story of what happens to Occidentals caught in China when good Chinese are away at the wars and the bandits whistle in the treetops. The chief bandit is Voronsky (C. Henry Gordon) whose whispered name is enough to send Chinese Paul Reveres scudding over the country. Huddled against Voronsky's coming are the whites under the leadership of a drunken riverboat captain (Richard Dix). They stand off Voronsky with a machinegun, between intervals of comic relief by Zasu Pitts as a handkerchief-wringing tourist and Edward Everett Horton as a timid lover. Gwili Andre, a beauteous mannequin who deserted the fashion magazines for Hollywood, is the mysterious refugee suspected of being Voronsky's chattel. She falls in love with Richard Dix who spurns her, until in the last reel they all escape with surprising ease to the river. No credible picture of modern China, Roar of the Dragon is fair melodrama. White men and women maintain copybook virtues in the unspeakable shadow of Mongol bloodlust. Typical dialog: "You don't know Voronsky." "Only casually; I just bit his ear off."

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