The New Pictures

Too Busy to Work (Fox). People who like Will Rogers in the cinema often use the word "lovable" to describe his gargling impersonations. This time Will Rogers is a lovable tramp named Jubilo, vaguely desirous of revenging himself on a man who made off with his wife during the War. Even revenge, for Jubilo, reduces itself to loitering. He loiters into the household of a respectable judge (Frederick Burton) who naturally turns out to be the man Jubilo is looking for. After trying to milk a cow by putting a pail under it and saying "Go on!", straightening out romantic difficulties for his own daughter (Marion Nixon) without telling her who he is, Jubilo loiters away from the household of Judge Hardy, singing a Jubilo song.

If I Had a Million (Paramount) develops an obvious idea in an obvious way. Since the obvious idea is one which cinema producers have overlooked, and since it is handled with skill and enthusiasm, If I Had a Million gives the impression of being a startlingly original picture as well as clever and interesting. John Glidden (Richard Bennett) is a crusty millionaire, infuriated by the avarice and incompetence of the persons who expect to inherit his money. Instead of making a will he decides to distribute his fortune, $1,000,000 at a time, to persons selected at random from the telephone directory. The first million goes to a butter-fingered salesman (Charles Ruggles) in a china store. He buys himself a cane, invites his employer to watch him use it on shelves of tableware. A prostitute (Wynne Gibson) takes a room in an expensive hotel and goes to bed alone, without her stockings. A forger (George Raft) is unable to find anyone who will cash a good check for him. He ends by trading it for one night's shelter, to the proprietor of a 10-c- lodging house who uses it to light a cigar. A bedazzled Marine (Gary Cooper), an ex-vaudeville actress (Alison Skipworth) and her husband (W. C. Fields), a condemned murderer (Gene Raymond) are also among Mr. Glidden's beneficiaries, as is a miserable fat clerk (Charles Laughton). This clerk waddles to the office of the president of his concern, pauses to straighten his necktie, then opens the door. What he does next is impossible properly to describe. The last recipient of Mr. Glidden's largesse is Mrs. Walker, the most energetic inmate of an old lady's home. She uses her money to turn the home into a sort of resort hotel, where games of chance, cursing, radios and cookery, previously forbidden, are encouraged.

Directors Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Taurog, Stephen Roberts, Norman McLeod, James Cruze, William A. Seiter and H. Bruce Humberstone were responsible for various episodes of If I Had a Million and 16 Paramount writers took part in what must have been the highly amusing game of writing it. As fodder for the cinema public, If I Had a Million has the disadvantage of lacking sustained suspense. This may prevent it from starting a cycle. Good shot : Mr. Bennett gasping with fury when, picking up a telephone book to start his scheme, he happens first on the name of John D. Rockefeller.

Charles Laughton has distinguished himself since his acting career started six years ago by developing to an almost pathological degree the trick upon which all acting is based--submerging his own personality to meet the requirements of an impersonation Some of this ability he attributes to his study of human behavior while clerk and cashier of Claridge's Hotel London, before the War. After serving in the Navy, Laughton became interested in acting. He studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, played his first stage role in 1926, went to the U. S. in 1931 to act in Payment Deferred. Paramount was shrewd enough to secure his services for the cinema. Since then, versatile Mr. Laughton's roles have been: a British submarine commander, morbidly jealous of his wife, in Devil and the Deep; a sly terrified bank clerk in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's otherwise unsatisfactory cinema of Payment Deferred; a Welsh millionaire, afraid of his mistress, in The Old Dark House; a wheedling, effeminate, sadistic Emperor Nero in De Mille's The Sign of the Cross. In his next picture, Island of Lost Souls, Laughton will be a villainous physician. Laughton comments on technique: "In acting for the camera I have had the reassurance that slight gestures and facial expressions would reach the whole audience instead of the first half-dozen rows. . . . One advantage of the screen is the stimulus that comes with frequent change [of role]. . . . I like to shade my characterizations on the side of repression until the climactic moments. . . . I have always had a particular fear of overacting. . . ."

Under-Cover Man (Paramount). Two years ago, when every third picture was about gangsters, cinema crooks were a vigorous and wary breed, cunning, courageous, efficient. Because it seemed to the Hays organization that vicious characters should be made less admirable the cinema stopped glorifying the underworld. Now it appears to have gone far in the other direction. Knaves in the cinema have become so helpless and naive that they can scarcely help arousing sympathy in tender-hearted cinemaddicts. The three unprincipled characters in Under-Cover Man try hard to be bad. They do it so foolishly that they seem to need managers or mothers to watch over them; for the police to punish them with jail or bullets instead of dunce-caps seems unfair. Martoff (Gregory Ratoff) and Kenneth Mason (Lew Cody) are partners in bond stealing. When Mason kills a messenger he keeps the stiletto with which he did it on his desk where people can mistake it for a fountain pen. His chauffeur is a police stool pigeon and he discards a traitorous mistress (Noel Francis) for a coy blonde (Nancy Carroll) without bothering to find out that the latter is the sister of the murdered messenger. As for Martoff, he handles his revolver as though it were a popgun. Not satisfied with having one stool pigeon on the premises, he enters negotiations with another (George Raft) who has entered the services of the police in order to avenge his father--whom Martoff has murdered in a pet. It would be idle to explain how the downfall of Martoff and Mason is achieved. Taking their stolen bonds away from them is like taking purloined lollipops from kindergarten kleptomaniacs. The only wonder is that George Raft and Nancy Carroll make it all seem so difficult. If you can avoid feeling sorry for the law-breaking element in Under-Cover Man, it is an entertaining little melodrama which gives Raft a chance to capitalize his air of a hard-boiled Valentino. Ratoff capitalizes an accent so strong that it must embarrass some of his employers.

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