The New Pictures

Pre-reviewing Blondie of the Follies (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the Hearst-papers last week blurbed: "Marion [Davies] plays a 'Queen of the Follies,' and it is by no chance that the role is hers, for she knows by heart the thoughts, words and deeds of the regally gilded queens of Broadway. . . . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has assembled its greatest cast since Grand Hotel*. . . ." This cast: Robert Montgomery; Zasu Pitts, independent comic who does bit work in so many cinemas she seldom learns their plots, cannot remember their titles; James Gleason, who in this one supplies the pathos, dies; Jimmy ("Schnozzle") Durante, who appears in one scene for five minutes; Billie Dove, whose once shapely figure has assumed dimensions hardly commensurate with her role--that of Miss Davies' friend in the Follies. The story concerns the quick jump of the two young ladies from an East Side tenement to swank apartments on Park Avenue. First Miss Dove gets into the chorus, permits herself to be kept. Miss Davies follows in short order, is set up in style befitting a "regally gilded queen." Montgomery, once provider for Miss Dove, falls in love with Miss Davies. The frequent quarrels of Miles Davies & Dove reach a climax when Miss Dove intentionally lets slip Miss Davies' hand during a revolving ballet number. Miss Davies breaks a leg. After a farewell party at which she gets her mother intoxicated, she returns to the East Side. Montgomery finally appears with 1) four specialists who promise they can mend the broken limb and 2) a proposal of marriage. Through the picture flows bottle upon bottle of chilled champagne.

Life Begins (Warner) is a surprising production for a medium in which even the picture of a stork or of a cabbage patch was once considered too outspoken. It is Grand Hotel in an obstetrical ward--the principal members of its cast are seven expectant mothers, one of them equipped with twins. The old theme of a father waiting for his child to be born is only the springboard episode for Life Begins. Before the main plot develops, the audience has heard the moans of the "labor room," seen a pregnant woman of the world (Glenda Farrell) drink whiskey from a hot water bottle, and sympathized with an unmarried mother when she says that soldiers who die on the field of battle and mothers who die in childbirth go directly to heaven. The large lying-in cast of Life Begins emphasizes the predicament of its most pathetic member, Grace Sutton. She (Loretta Young) is a young matron who anticipates, in addition to the pangs of a delivery, 20 years in prison because she is a murderess. This causes the physicians who are attending her confinement to make a decision which is tragic for Grace Sutton's young husband (Eric Linden). When her labor pains have lasted for 30 hours, they decide on a Caesarian operation, save the child and let the mother die.

There are times when the story of Life Begins is almost snowed under by a blizzard of tiny garments and when Directors James Flood and Elliott Nugent seem to have forgotten that ''Don't confuse the issue" is as good a motto for films as for maternity hospitals. There are too many scenes showing a mother's pleased surprise on first viewing her offspring, too many shots of prop infants wrapped in blankets. Despite these faults and a theme which is a little too obviously dripping with drama, Life Begins, first release on Warner Brothers' 1932-33 production program, manages to be tender without being mawkish, sympathetic without being sentimental. Good shot: a nurse (Aline MacMahon) telling Sutton what has happened to his wife.

Loretta Young and Eric Linden, well suited to their roles, are two of the youngest featured players in Hollywood. Linden, 22, made his cinema debut as an usher in Roxy's Theatre, Manhattan. A professor who had taught him English at Columbia saw him there, secured him a job with the Theatre Guild. He acted in Manhattan for one year, went abroad with a U. S. company, toured France on a bicycle, returned on a cattle boat, performed in television. RKO's Are These Our Children? was his first picture. To emphasize his youthful appearance, he seldom has a haircut and sometimes shows a tendency, wisely controlled in Life Begins, to blubber.

Loretta (real name: Gretchen) Young two years ago helped make a name for herself by eloping to Yuma, Ariz. with Cinemactor Grant Withers, despite protests of her mother who said that, at 17, she was not old enough for matrimony. She refused to try to have her marriage annulled, ended it by divorce after 17 months. Her sisters, Polly Ann Young and Sally Blane, are cinemactresses. Loretta Young got her first job when a director called up Polly Ann. Under five-year contract to First National, she has had increasingly important roles in The Riding Voice, Taxi, The Hatchet Man, Play Girl. Appealing modulation of voice and manner, decorous softness of demeanor are Cinemactress Young's chief characteristics on the screen; she attributed them in part to her schooling in a Los Angeles convent. The fluffiness of her brown mop she attributes to her habit of shampooing it with cleaning fluid.

A Passport to Hell (Fox). Elissa Landi is a cinemactress whom it is hard to suspect of misconduct. Her face, as honest as it is handsome, and her carefully cultivated British accent make gentility her most obvious characteristic. Yet she is frequently cast as a spy, a prostitute or both. In The Yellow Ticket she carried the credentials of an inexpensive adventuress and A Passport to Hell is in some respects the same sort of affair. Exiled from a British colony in Africa on account of some vague scandal, Miss Landi arrives in a German settlement where a young lieutenant (Alexander Kirkland) marries her to save her from being interned. Presently Miss Landi is moping about in the backwoods, where she falls in love with her husband's friend (Paul Lukas) and is insulted by her husband's father (Warner Oland). When someone steals a map, it should be obvious to all that Miss Landi is not guilty. Instead she is immediately arrested and only her husband's suicide shows who really opened the safe. Hemmed in by acres of mosquito netting and a thoroughly artificial story, Miss Landi tries hard to act dramatically but is unable to do much more than stride up & down with an anxious stoop, clasping her face and muttering: "It can't go on like this."

Okay America (Universal), like Blessed Event and Is My Face Red?, has one of Colyumist Walter Winchell's catchwords for a title but otherwise does not belong in the category of colyumist pictures. It derives from the Lindbergh kidnapping, which the producers have agreed like gentlemen, with Tsar Hays as policeman, not to use. Lew Ayres seems a little juvenile as Larry Wayne, a colyumist who undertakes to act as intermediary for Bootlegger Mileaway Rossi (Louis Calhern) who has kidnapped the daughter of a Cabinet member. He secures a $50,000 ransom, entrusts it to another go-between for Mileaway who fails to return the girl. Mileaway's reason: a head gangster who resembles Al Capone wants the girl kept until the President promises to quash certain indictments. Larry Wayne does what no real Broadway colyumist has yet accomplished: he has an interview with the President (played by a fat-shouldered double, photographed from the rear). He then misinforms the head gangster about the President's decision, retrieves the girl, bustles off to a broadcasting station with gangsters in pursuit. Typical shot: the gangster who resembles Capone (Berton Churchill) remarking, while he reads Dickens, "That Fagin guy was a tough mug."

*The cast of Grand Hotel: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt.

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