The New Pictures

Big City Blues (Warner). A house detective foraging in a linen closet for his bottle of gin ... chorus girls in a hotel lobby to meet a friend's friend ... the elderly lady who sits alone in speakeasies, puffing a long cigaret holder ... a paper bag in the arm of a bootlegger, asleep on a sofa waiting to be paid . . . paraphernalia for a party, scattered across the top of a hotelroom table. . . . Shots like these, because they have the authentic flavor of one type of night-life in Manhattan, are what make Big City Blues an interesting picture.

The story itself, about a country boy (Eric Linden) who comes to New York to set the town on fire and goes home with scorched fingers, might have been much better handled. Ward Morehouse, who wrote it, is a theatrical reporter who knows more about how theatrical people talk than he does about writing plays. His picture is really a "color story" rather than the melodrama which it sometimes attempts to be or the soft satiric comedy which it could have been. The slight romance between Linden and a kind-hearted chorus girl (Joan Blondell); his associa tion with a gay and amazingly unresourceful confidence man (Walter Catlett): the bravado of his return to Willow Creek are incidents which a more astute playwright might have been able to develop without recourse to such familiar props of metropolitan melodrama as a slain chorus girl, a gimlet-eyed detective on the wrong track. Linden gulps so hard throughout Big City Blues that he succeeds in swallowing his part.

The Crash (Warner), adapted from Larry Barretto's novel, Children of Pleasure, is a gloomy little survey of hard times in high places. George Brent is Geoffrey Gault, whose system for playing the stock market is to have his wife make herself attractive to operators wiser than himself so that they will give her tips. Ruth Chatterton is Linda Gault who, failing to secure information from a banker who has obliged her in the past, pretends she has succeeded and gives her husband advice which causes him large losses. If the central figures in The Crash had been presented as bad examples rather than as victims of circumstance, the pic ture might have had considerable power. As it stands, it is difficult to be aroused about a matrimonial rift which occurs when Linda Gault makes friends with a rich Australian sheep rancher (Paul Cavanagh). It is even harder to be enthusiastic over the reconciliation which Geoffrey Gault effects after he has used letters written to his wife by her banker friend in order to blackmail the banker into lending him $25,000. When George Brent kisses Ruth Chatterton now, he kisses his wife. When he kissed her for the cameras filming The Crash he was kissing his fiancee. At that time Miss Chatterton was waiting for her divorce from Actor Ralph Forbes. A month ago she married tall, dark-eyed Brent who is 28, an Irish newsman's son, born and schooled in Dublin. In several pictures, notably The Rich Are Always with Us, he played opposite Miss Chatterton. Miss Chatterton, whom Warner lured away from Paramount, still enjoys the distinction of being the only famed female stage-star to make an even greater success in talking pictures. Last week she withdrew from the cast of Paris Racket to play in Common Ground opposite her husband, whom Warner is touting as a rival to flapper-flutterer Clark Gable. 70,000 Witnesses (Paramount). It is pleasant to imagine the uproar that would occur if the circumstances of this picture were reproduced in real life. It is the day of an important football game. Seventy thousand spectators are howling in the stadium, the Scoreboard is in a crucial condition and the star halfback has just been given the ball. He goes around end. neatly sidesteps two tacklers and scuttles off, with a clear field, for the goal. He does not reach it. Instead, wobbling wildly from side to side and grimacing as though he had just swallowed someone's knuckle, he falls down dead.

Novelty is the cardinal virtue of murder mysteries and of stories about college football. The novelty of combining the two types should be well rewarded in this case. After the demise of the halfback, a raucous detective (David Landau) sets about finding out who killed him. It was not his sister (Dorothy Jordan) nor. probably, her fiance (Phillips Holmes). It might have been the fiance's brother, a high-grade gambler with few scruples. It was almost certainly not a reporter and radio announcer (Charles Ruggles) who stays drunk enough to be harmless. As a matter of fact, the identity of the criminal is much less important in this case than his method: external application of nitroglycerine so that, when the halfback runs, the exertion taxes his overstimulated heart and causes it to stop. Good shot: the halfback's sister learning what has happened to him when she hears the detective telephoning the coroner.

China Express (Sovkino), a three-year-old Russian cinema now re-released with sound and subtitles by Novelist Michael Gold, shows another clash of fatheaded bourgeois and lean, potent peasants. Before making Shanghai Express, Hollywood Director Joseph von Sternberg ran this picture off in the Paramount studio. In tempo, in the characters of the pretty Chinese girl (sold to the textile factories in China Express), the European courtesan (Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express), the villainous Chinese general (Warner Oland in Shanghai Express), a phonograph sequence, the Russian and U. S. versions are cousins. While the dramatic tension of Shanghai Express petered out halfway, China Express sustains its emotional drive. Chinese peasants in the third class are intolerably put upon by white overseers, Chinese mercenaries, until they flick off the discipline of ages, tear guns out of packing cases, seize the train, bowl bloodily through the night, ending on Michael Gold's query, "Whither, China?" As in all Soviet cinemas, the propaganda intention sentimentalizes the peasants' granite stolidity, strength, integrity, virtue and their inhuman forbear ance which as usual breaks halfway through the picture, giving an actual effect of uniformly hysterical, bad-tempered peasants, continually flinging their arms about at promptly pop-eyed bourgeoisie. Notable is the Russian trick of making the actors assume an expression of utter child-like peace just before they commit horrid acts of mayhem. Good shots: pudding shaking in time to phonograph and dancing couple; a Chinese station master chewing faster, faster as the China Express speeds by without stopping; the apple-cheeked, button-eyed, bemedaled Manchurian general shown from below.

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