The New Pictures

Goona-Goona (Independent) is the first cinema taken in the island of Bali in the Malay Archipelago. Producer Andre Roosevelt (distant cousin) and his son-in-law Armand Denis privately showed a first version three years ago in Manhattan. They have revised and cut it, added a new beginning. They still deserve credit as the discoverers of Bali, despite Charles Trego's lovelier Isle of Paradise (TIME, Sept. 12). Goona-Goona was shown at the French Colonial Exposition in Paris, rushed out of storage following the success of Isle of Paradise.

The story is based on a legend: A Balinese prince, returned from his European tour, sees a coolie girl he wants just before she marries a member of her own caste. After the marriage, the prince has his sister get a sorcerer's potion (goona-goona) and give it to the coolie girl in a dish of rice. He has the husband sent away and has his will with the drugged wife, leaving his royal hereditary kriss (jeweled, big-handled-sword) behind. The husband finds it, kills the prince, is himself killed.

The little heroine Dasnee is charming, but with the other female actors she finds it hard to keep from laughing at the melodramatic faces she is asked to make by her good friend Andre Roosevelt. The male actors are quite serious. The story is practically impossible in modern Bali. The Balinese code allows a girl to be as promiscuous before marriage as she likes.

The Night of June 13 (Paramount) begins as a suburban Street Scene, continues as a study of neurotic jealousy, ends as a satire on courtroom justice and middle-aged women. Striking is Director Stephen Roberts' opening device of summarizing his characters by showing a boy taking over a newspaper route on Laurel Avenue, being told by his predecessor the stories behind the house fronts. These include the Curry household where the wife (Adrianne Allen) is absurdly jealous of her husband (Clive Brook); the Strawn household where middleaged. Kewpie-doll Mazie (Mary Boland) badgers her husband (Charles Ruggles) and her bibulous father-in-law (Charley Grapewin ); the Morrow household where a shrew runs the Temperance Union and cows her menfolk; and the Blake girls Ginger (Frances Dee), who loves young. Morrow, and Martha. When Mrs. Curry kills herself to make her husband sorry, the circumstances implicate the husband as murderer. When the witnesses come up, each discovers that he has something embarrassing to conceal. Several little harmless perjuries make an airtight case for the prosecution. But at last simple hearts in the persons of Grandpop Strawn and a bootlegger enter as surprise, witnesses and tell the truth, which sounds entirely incredible against the massed perjuries of Glenwood Park. So they perjure themselves, too, and so credibly that the prisoner is discharged. The Night of June 13, written by Vera Caspary. is bitter against meddling women and tender toward badgered men. Good shots: the kaleidoscope of Glenwood Park after Mrs. Curry's suicide, showing each household finishing a statement begun by the last; Grandpop Strawn letting chickens into the garden; Mrs. Curry's slightly crossed eyes peering out the window for her husband.

Movie Crazy (Paramount) shows Harold Lloyd in the romantic-bumpkin-in-the-movies plot, first done in Harry Leon Wilson's Merton of the Movies. He writes for a screen test, enclosing the wrong photograph, gets an encouraging answer. Arriving at the Hollywood station, he is asked to walk through a scene being shot on the station platform. Blandly he boggles the proceedings with every move, in routine slapstick. His screen test runs into scores of retakes. In the executive offices, every glass door he closes crashes. In the rain his shoe catches in a grating, washes down a sewer as he hops one-legged in pursuit. Helping Constance Cummings raise her automobile top, he dismembers it, wrecks her umbrella too, causes a traffic snarl, earns her astonished love and a pet name, "Trouble."

The story becomes congested and ingenious. Lloyd is calm and patronizing with Constance Cummings, does not recognize her at the studio made up as a Spanish senorita, is unstrung and offers her his class pin. As herself, she later reproaches him, becomes engaged to him, tells him to get back the pin. As the senorita, she makes him kiss her, refuses to return the pin. To measure up in the romantic situation, Lloyd earnestly sweats and darts about. Even when she sends him a note saying that she is through, he reads the wrong side, goes to the Hollywood party to which it is an invitation. The picture's best comedy follows when he takes a conjurer's dress-coat by mistake in the washroom, finds eggs in his hand, rabbits in his vest, mice and gimmicks everywhere. A water-spouting gardenia wets the eye of a producer's wife. He is thrown out, reads the other side of the invitation.

Next day, showing a tentative amount of fight with his rival for Constance Cummings, he is knocked cold into a wicker trunk. The trunk is dragged onto the set where a flood scene is about to be shot. Lloyd comes to and launches himself into the plot, wrecking everything but so amusing the producer as to win a contract as comedian of the age.

Not quite the comedian of the age, Harold Lloyd is second to Chaplin as a moneymaker. He first tried to get into the cinema when his father collected $3,500 insurance for two broken legs, tried again after the motion picture industry began to move from San Diego to Hollywood. After a brief apprenticeship stopping custard pies for Hal Roach, he began to throw them as Willie Work and Lonesome Luke. When a real bomb exploded in his hand he lay in a hospital for nine months, came out determined to do straight comedy parts, discarding trick clothes, retaining only lens-less horn-rimmed glasses. Expert arrangements in uninspired, sure-fire comedy, his pictures have been enormously successful. His wife is Mildred Davis, once his leading lady. His children are Gloria, 6, Peggy, 5 (adopted) and Harold Jr., 17 mo. When he takes off his glasses and relaxes his face, Harold Sr. is unrecognizably older and sober. He has lately been obliged to reshoot scenes because of his semiconscious habit of saying, "What the hell?"

The Painted Woman (Fox) is the venerable story of a courtesan in the South Pacific trying to be bourgeois against the claims of her past. In a low-ceilinged dive, Peggy Shannon narrows her peevish cat's-eyes, wiggles her spangles, making the patrons incredibly lecherous. When a drunken sailor follows her to her room, she brains him and flees with her lover (William Boyd) on the 500-ton three-master Southern Cross. He drops her at a French colonial island where she is wooed by wet-lipped Irving Pichel and wisecracking Spencer Tracy, who offers marriage too. When she hears that the alarming Boyd's ship has been lost, she accepts Tracy's proposition and cooks him pork and beans every night. When Boyd returns, she wraps everybody in a complicated filigree of lies, ending in two killings, a parting and reconciliation with Tracy. Only Tracy works to make The Painted Woman credible.

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