The New Pictures

A Bedtime Story (Paramount). In the back seat of his automobile, the Vicomte de St. Denis (Maurice Chevalier) discovers, abandoned but chipper, a male infant. With this for a beginning, anyone who has ever seen a Chevalier picture should have a fair idea of how the story will develop: how the Vicomte happily lets the baby break his watch; how he splashes water on his patient valet (Edward Everett Horton) to amuse the infant; how he turns his bachelor apartment into a day nursery and dismisses, one by one, his lady friends; how he hires a nurse (Helen Twelvetrees) and falls in love with her after quarreling with his fiancee.

A Bedtime Story is cunningly conceived on the premise that if Maurice Chevalier appeals strongly to female cinemaddicts. Chevalier with a foundling will appeal twice as strongly. The infant in the picture, billed as Baby LeRoy, is really eight-month-old LeRoy Winebrenner, of Pasadena, Calif. Paramount hired him from his mother for $1,000 and a $2,500 endowment policy to mature when he is 15. Partially bald, with a jolly, unscrupulous face. Cinemactor LeRoy is ingratiating in much the same way as Cinemactor Chevalier. Although he cannot talk, he gurgles more convincingly than Chevalier, who now speaks English perfectly, sometimes has a hard time remembering his French inflections.

The Working Man (Warner). John Reeves (George Arliss) of Reeves Shoe Co. is a testy old tycoon; when his nephew and general manager implies that his days of usefulness are over, he takes himself fishing in a rage, runs into the two addle-headed children of his recently deceased industrial rival, Hartland. At first, Reeves plans to diddle the Hartland heirs out of their shoe factory. Presently he changes his mind; it pleases him better to get himself appointed their guardian under a pseudonym, make them help him build up their plant. This adds to their self-respect and diminishes the conceit of Reeves's nephew. It does not do Reeves Shoe Co. any harm because the nephew falls in love with the Hartland girl (Bette Davis) and it looks as though the companies might merge about the time the two young people get married.

As a foster-father, George Arliss is to be preferred to Maurice Chevalier (see above) on several counts. Instead of sticking out his under lip and singing, he pulls down his upper lip and speaks, in a dry tone, with perfect diction. Chevalier's picture emphasizes the good effects of dissipation; the lesson in the Arliss cinema is about the advantages of sobriety and the respect which children owe their elders. The Working Man, like most Arliss vehicles. has charm as well as respectability; if Mr. Arliss is too definitely of the old school. Bette Davis is certainly of a different school. Good shot: the last one, of Arliss' toes, placed on the gunwale of his fishing boat, while he regards them with tired satisfaction.

Supernatural (Paramount). In the profession of mind-reading the cinema has found a fine new target with gaudy trimmings. The hero of The Great Jasper was an astrologer who was best acquainted with the stars on brandy bottles; in The MindReader Warren William was violent, spurious but nonetheless likable in the turban of a phony medium. Unlike either. Paul Bavian (Allan Dinehart) of Supernatural is a lecherous and cowardly crook who ends up where he belongs, at the end of a rope.

The picture would have been much better if it had been more explicit about how its most interesting personage reaches this sad predicament. A plot which is more of an insinuation than a narrative implies that the soul of Bavian's dead mistress, a lady sadist executed for strangling three of her lovers, comes back to inhabit temporarily the body of a pure young heiress (Carole Lombard) who consults Bavian to get news of her dead twin brother. The heiress faints during a seance; when she wakes up, her eyes have a fiendish glitter. She entices Bavian aboard her yacht. He breaks out of her cabin in a puzzled panic and manages to strangle himself, apparently on the anchor rope, while trying to escape. Silliest shot: Bavian leering at his poor old dipsomaniac landlady until she falls over in a giggling swoon.

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