The New Pictures

Carolina (Fox). Into this screen version of Paul Green's House of Connelly Director Henry King has put some taste, more thought and much work. With four cameramen, an art director, an architect and Scenarist Reginald Berkeley, he spent six weeks in North and South Carolina last summer collecting local color. Out of 40,000 feet of film shot on this hunt for atmosphere less than 500 got into the finished work. Tobacco markets near Millin, S. C., cigaret factories at Winston-Salem,

N. C., a thunderstorm over Charleston Bay from the Battery, a country store at Mars Bluff, S. C., old churches and older graveyards lent their bit to the production. In search of a house for the Connellys Director King and party visited Redcliffe, plantation home of the descendants of Senator James Henry ("Cotton is King") Hammond (1807-64) at Beech Island, S. C. across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga. Noted were its enormous hall, its silver hardware, its fallen plaster, its air of dingy decay. Outside of Florence, S. C., Director King found the old Johnson plantation house which he had carefully measured and photographed. When he got back to Hollywood he had the outside of the Johnson house reproduced in full scale (see cut) while interior scenes were made to suggest the big boxlike rooms of Redcliffe. Against this carefully assembled background he was able to do a picture that smacks and smells of the South of 30 years ago.

The story weaves its way along the threadbare theme of broken-down Southern aristocracy living on the hard crusts of the past. The Connellys, mother (Henrietta Crosman), son Will (Robert Young ) and Uncle Bob (Lionel Barrymore) occupy Connelly Hall but are so strapped that they can no longer get credit at the country store. A Northerner ("damn blue-bellied Yankee") moves in upon their acres as a tenant farmer, starts an experimental tobacco crop. On his death his daughter Joanna (Janet Gaynor) carries on. Young Will Connelly falls in love with her. Proud old Mrs. Connelly indignantly orders the girl off her place. Alter the usual to-do Will makes a stand, marries Joanna, turns the plantation from cotton to tobacco and reaps a new fortune. Tight-laced Mrs. Connelly is last seen smoking a cigaret.

Not an integral part of the story, Lionel Barrymore plays a sniveling old Confederate veteran, full of pride, a musty love affair and corn whiskey. Best shot: Barrymore, under the delusion that he is again commanding troops in the field, shouldering his cane, marching off down the great hall to shoot himself dead in the back yard. Silliest shot: a ball at Connelly Hall immediately after the First Battle of Bull Run attended by President Davis and Generals Lee, Jackson and Beauregard.

Catherine the Great (London Films) is more tender than The Private Life of Henry the VlII (Charles Laughton), more glittering than Queen Christina (Greta Garbo). But what makes this sumptuous pageant of antique Russia noteworthy is the presence in the title role of an able Viennese actress named Elizabeth Bergner.

Historically, Catherine II (1729-96) was an ambitious, shrewd, capable ruler, fonder of sleeping with politically potent gentlemen than of romping with her guardsmen. Because, as in the case of mannish Christina of Sweden, such cold facts would make indifferent cinema, Catherine becomes gentle, amiable, lovable for her good heart and good sense. Arriving in Russia a bewildered, unsophisticated German child-princess, she learns she is not wanted by the heir apparent, Grand Duke Peter (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). But she changes his mind when she inadvertently meets him. Married, she wins the trust of Russia's clever, lustful Empress Elizabeth (Flora Robson). The Grand Duke is moody, ill-tempered, pathological. He seeks Catherine's bed only when--like Queen Christina under different circumstances--she says she has had 17 lovers. When Elizabeth dies the new Emperor Peter III rules recklessly, becomes increasingly suspicious of Catherine and of all others whom the old Empress favored. In a banquet scene deftly underscored with pity he forces Catherine to sit at the foot of the table, has her Order of St. Catherine taken from her and placed on the breast of his mistress. He tells her sadly of his plan to put her in a convent. Then Catherine realizes she must give in to the officers who want to make her Empress by a coup d'etat. Her principal concern is that Peter will not be harmed--a matter which historically bothered Catherine II not at all. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. puts cruelty and craft in his performance of Peter III but lets his relish in clothes--swishing robes, shiny boots & swords--suggest a highschool senior in a commencement play. England's great Sir Gerald du Maurier plays a French valet. Catherine the Great, however, is Elizabeth Bergner's play. She is small (102 lb.), gentle, supple but not beautiful. In a blonde wig she is a young Catherine that might have been stamped on a bright silver coin. Possessed of extremely large brown eyes, she looks prettily petite when reviewing her guardsmen in tights. But at last when in a roomful of officers she learns her husband is dead, her wrath and majesty are so great that her stature suddenly seems to increase and dominate the men. Elizabeth Bergner appeared first on the stage as a homely, skinny child of eleven. She was pelted with flowers and kisses when she later played in Berlin in Shaw's Saint Joan. To learn English, Actress Bergner rehearsed in London in a play especially written for her, abandoned it to act successively in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, Strange Interlude, The Constant Nymph. Currently she is in Escape Me Never, a companion piece to The Constant Nymph which will bring her to Manhattan this spring. When this opened, critics talked of another Duse but some galleryites booed, under the impression that Miss Bergner is a Nazi. She is a Jewess.

The first glimpse she had of herself in cinema caused Actress Bergner to forswear it. She took it up again because, improvident, she wished to make some money for a sick friend. Appearing in Nju, she married the director, Dr. Paul Czinner who has since done all her pictures. Actress Bergner likes Schnitzler, wiener schnitzel, skating, odd-looking clothes. She dislikes women who smoke, smokes incessantly herself.

Search for Beauty (Paramount) is a benign sexual romp, publicized as an apostrophe to beauty, male as well as female ("Venus-like Girls! Tarzan-like Men!"). It presents: 30 handsome youngsters picked in promotional beauty contests throughout the U. S. and the British Empire; neat blonde Ida Lupino and muscular Larry ("Buster") Crabbe (Tarzan the Fearless). Lupino and Crabbe are Olympic swimmers. Hired by a pair of shifty rogues (James Gleason, Robert Armstrong) to run a physical culture magazine, they are soon shocked to discover what a crooked venture it really is. Crabbe is so vigorously honest that his employers are glad to get rid of him by giving him an interest in a run-down health farm and $10,000 to rehabilitate it. The 30 handsome youngsters go to the farm as health instructors. Upon opening, the farm is also thronged by unhealthy lechers, male and female, whom Gleason and Armstrong have invited with unsavory promises. They soon learn that beauty-contest winners are not to be trifled with.

Search for Beauty might have begun as a satire on Publisher Bernarr Macfadden's hook-up of health and sex, but it ended by emulating it. Exhibited in an elaborate calisthenic routine are chesty males in shorts; slim females in bathing suits.

Joe Palooka (Reliance) derives its name from ringside slang for a low-grade prizefighter. Its story hangs around a pudgy young oaf (Stuart Erwin) who takes up with a fretful, excitable boxing manager (Jimmy Durante) and demonstrates that he cannot fight. Though he manages to knock down a champion (William Cagney, brother of James) who is in his cups, though he importantly squires a night club artist (Lupe Velez). Joe Falooka eventually takes a thorough mauling in the ring. This sends him back to a chicken farm where his mother (Marjorie Rambeau) has wanted him to be.

Devil Tiger (Fox) Director Clyde E. Elliott, who filmed Frank Buck's Bring 'Em Back Alive, has signed affidavits that every foot of Devil Tiger was filmed in the jungles of India, Siam, Indo-China and Malaya. His shot of a lion fighting a tiger (with the comment that lions are "nearly" extinct in Asia) may cause some quarrels. Many an animal expert believes that what lions there are in Asia are on the central plains, not in the southern jungles. Nonetheless Director Elliott's lion and tiger stage a good if indecisive fight, as do numerous other animals in a lavish variety of combats. Pythons grapple with a leopard, a water buffalo, a man. A crocodile fights a tiger, a binturong a lizard, a bear a hyena. A stampede of elephants helps out Devil Tiger's slim plot by trampling the leader of a safari. An amorous fellow, he has been gazing upon the pretty girl of the party, bathing naked. So numerous are the animals and so loud their snarls, grunts and roars that when the fearsome Devil Tiger finally appears his death seems a mild anticlimax.

This Side of Heaven (Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer). The hero (Lionel Barrymore) of this picture endures simultaneously more calamities than occur in the course of four normal lifetimes. His employer runs off with his firm's money and poor Turner is accused of embezzlement. His elder daughter becomes engaged to a prig. His younger daughter asks a loafer to seduce her. His son, weeping because a college fraternity has snubbed him, drives his sedan into a trolley car. And his devoted wife (Fay Bainter) accepts a job as a Hollywood scenarist. Turner then tries to commit suicide and fails. Completely at odds with his material, Director Howard for some reason tried to convey the impression that This Side of Heaven was a homely little comedy, full of incidents with which an average audience would be familiar. Typical shot: Barrymore, when his foolish wife inquires what is wrong, replying with a noble head-wag: "I'm a little tired."

The Big Shakedown (First National) suggests that racketeers who traffic in spurious pharmaceuticals, now that beer is out, may encounter unforeseen difficulties. Ricardo Cortez, a gangster who intimidates everybody by twitching his eyebrows and saying "You mug!" ends up in a vat of acid. He is tossed there by Charles Farrell, a chemist who starts out by making imitation "Pearlydent" toothpaste for him, makes a non-antiseptic antiseptic only because bullied into it, but changes his mind when some fraudulent digitalis (heart stimulant) causes his own baby to be stillborn.

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