The New Pictures

Stand Up and Cheer (Fox) contains a penguin dressed to resemble Jimmy Durante; a song called "I'm Laughin'"; a grand finale parade, showing Hollywood chorus boys and girls waving their arms in time to ah anthem called "We're Out of the Red." None of these is any better than it sounds.

Cinemaddicts who do not consider that any performance by a child actress constitutes cruelty to adults may be pleased with the demure wrigglings of four-year-old Shirley Temple. Among other features of Stand Up and Cheer are two U. S. Senators (Mitchell and Durante) who proceed from an argument about the tariff to a slapstick vaudeville tumbling act; a scene in which Stepin Fetchit goes wading in a goldfish bowl hoping to catch a haddock; a pleasing song called "Baby Take a Bow."

The plot of Stand Up and Cheer, suggested by Will Rogers, concerns the efforts of a U. S. Secretary of Amusements (Warner Baxter) and his pretty assistant (Madge Evans) to improve the country's morale with government-supervised vaudeville acts. The picture aims to combine spontaneity and grandeur, succeeds in being an erratic and mildly entertaining musicomedy which makes the tedious mistake of harping on Depression.

Shirley Temple is the daughter of a branch manager of California Bank in Santa Monica. Associate Producer Lew Brown, who discovered Jackie Cooper, chose her for Stand Up and Cheer from a group of 200 child actresses who answered a general call. She had already learned to sing by imitating radio crooners. She learned most of her tap-dancing in three weeks on the Fox lot. Blonde and pretty, Shirley Temple signed her own contract with an "X."

Men in White (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) stays well inside the stern plot of Sidney Kingsley's play which is one of this year's strong contenders for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. George Ferguson (Clark Gable) is an able young surgeon interning at St. George's Hospital. His fiancee, Laura Hudson (Myrna Loy), feels that he pays too much attention to his job, too little to her. When she snubs him for postponing an engagement, he spends a careless night with a pretty resident nurse (Elizabeth Allan). The result of this misdemeanor is the gruesome climax of Men in White: a hysterectomy following an infective abortion. Dr. Ferguson does the operating. Dr. Hochberg (Jean Her-sholt), the surgeon who runs St. George's hospital and considers Dr. Ferguson his most promising interne, persuades Laura Hudson to watch it. Going under ether, the nurse babbles enough to explain the cause of her predicament. Laura Hudson faints, has to be carried from the operating room. The nurse dies. At the end of Men in White it looks as if some good may come of what has happened.

There are times in Men in White during which Director Richard Boleslavsky allows his excitement over the glossy interiors of St. George's, its shiny washrooms, its clean corridors and the house telephone service to get in the way of a simple, disagreeable story. More outspoken and more serious than the cinemas of the hospital saga of a year or two ago, the film is a harrowingly honest document. Good shot: Laura Hudson learning the lesson Dr. Hochberg wants to teach her, from Dr. Ferguson's impatient fury when she touches him, sterile after his scrub-up, with her bare hands in the operating room.

Tarzan and His Mate (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), sequel to Tarzan, the Ape Man, contains no implication that Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) and Jane Parker (Maureen O'Sullivan) have been married. They are living together in natural frivolity, ignoring the precepts of Tsar Hays, and obeying no civilized conventions except, perhaps, those of birth control.

When Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) Jane's defeated suitor, starts with a safari to retrieve the ivory from the valley of dead elephants, he encounters first Tarzan's gang of monkeys, later Tarzan, yodeling as usual, accompanied by Jane. (Jane has learned acrobatic tricks on rope-vines. Tarzan has learned a few new words of English.) Holt's wicked Partner Arlington (Paul Cavanagh) wounds one of Tarzan's favorite elephants, shrewdly follows it to the cemetery when it stumbles off to die. The safari is busy collecting tusks when Tarzan, in a rage, arrives. Treacherous Arlington shoots Tarzan, kidnaps Jane, starts back with the safari. Tarzan, left for dead, is only stunned. His apes escort him to a hideaway, cure his wound with leaf juice. By the time the safari has been attacked simultaneously by a tribe of cannibals and a pack of lions, Tarzan is again in good shape. He arrives in time to save Jane from the lions. The members of the safari have all been gruesomely stabbed or eaten.

A wild, disgraceful, highly entertaining orgy of comic, sensual and sadistic nonsense, Tarzan and His Mate was brilliantly directed by Cedric Gibbons, acted with vigor by Weissmuller and O'Sullivan.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.