The New Pictures

Scarlet Dawn (Warner). Soviet Russia interests Hollywood profoundly. Most of the major producers feel sure that there is a good scenario somewhere in the Five-Year Plan and they are trying hard to find it. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has spent $200,000 trying to do so without success; whatever Warner Brothers spent on this picture can safely be listed on the wrong side of the ledger also. This is the fault, not of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. who acts in the picture and helped Niven Busch Jr. write an intelligent adaptation from Mary McCall's novel, but of a weakness in the story itself. Trying to show how a young officer of the Tsar's guards faces the issues of the revolution by marrying one of his servants (Nancy Carroll) and becoming a son of honest toil instead of a Paris taxi driver, it does so in an obvious and sensational way, using the stock episodes of crown jewels, an escape to Constantinople, a U. S. heiress and the officer's slinky Moscow mistress (Lilyan Tashman). As sometimes happens in such cases, there are moments in Scarlet Dawn so well imagined that they make the rest of it seem even more shoddy than it is; the one, for instance, in which Nikiti's wife polishes his boots when he is preparing to desert her, so that he can do it in style.

Hot Saturday (Paramount). With Will H. Hays to guide it, the cinema is rapidly evolving a perplexing new morality all its own. This picture, for instance, makes Randolph Scott appear to be a boor and prig because he is disgruntled when his fiancee (Nancy Carroll) tells him she has spent the night with another man (Cary Grant).

From this it must not be supposed that Hot Saturday is an unusually daring or profligate production. On the contrary it is a stale and feeble homily, tepidly concerned with what passes for young love in a minor U. S. city. Nancy Carroll is a bank clerk and the town's prettiest girl. She is so popular that the gossips wag their tongues. When a young rake entertains her at his parties, it is taken for granted that he and she are misbehaving. More becomingly dressed than in Scarlet Dawn, Miss Carroll plays her stupid role ingratiatingly; Cary Grant is a new leading man who has the qualifications for an illustrious career. He acts with assurance, enunciates clearly, looks like Clark Gable with his ears pinned back.

Rockabye (RKO) marks the debut of Constance Bennett as a tragedienne. She is Judy Carrol, a successful actress with a gashouse past and a dipsomaniac mother. What she wants more than anything else is a baby. She tries to adopt one but the child's custodians decide Judy is incapable of providing it with a proper environment.

Judy Carrol takes up travel, makes friends with Playwright Jake Pell (Joel McCrea) who is estranged from his wife. A jolly suitor, he writes a play for her, escorts her into dubious cafes, fills her bedroom with balloons. It looks as though Judy Carrol were going to get her baby at last until, on the opening of the play, there comes a bulletin from his first wife. She has provided Playwright Pell not with a divorce but with an infant. Brave through it all, Judy Carrol sends her fiance back to his first wife and prepares to go on waiting.

During the filming of this picture, which she selected for herself, Constance Bennett lost ten pounds. This was not the only mishap in connection with Rockabye. A version of it made last summer with Phillips Holmes in Joel McCrea's role was so unsuccessful that RKO did the whole thing over again, with Jane Murfin & Kubec Glasmon to rewrite Horace Jackson's script and George Cukor directing instead of George Fitzmaurice. It emerges finally as a first-grade program picture, lachrymose but reasonable, brightened by Jobyna Howland's expert characterization of Judy's tippling mother. Instructive shot : Jobyna Howland struggling vaguely to stand up while drunk.

In Air Mail (Universal), for the first time, the cinema regards aviation as a reality rather than as a dazzling myth. It is a first-rate report on happenings in and about Desert Airport, where Mike Miller (Ralph Bellamy) is the mild competent manager and Duke Talbot (Pat O'Brien) is his swashbuckling star pilot. While Talbot dallies with a pilot's widow (Lillian Bond), Miller has to leave his girl (Gloria Stuart) to fly the mail. Naturally, even an honest aviation picture must contain a crash and rescue; this time they happen when Miller cracks up in a snowstorm and Talbot flies a stolen plane into the mountains to bring him back. Good shot: Desert Airport on Christmas night, with a pattern of planes rising in the lighted snowy air.

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