The New Pictures

Twentieth Century (Columbia). This febrile saga of a journey on New York Central's crack train was a Broadway success last year (TIME, Jan. 9, 1933). Authors Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur transcribed it into cinema by thinking up new and fantastic situations, by enlarging to heroic proportions the frenzied, egomaniac character of Impresario Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore), and by detailing the way he discovers a lingerie model named Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard), turns her into Lily Garland the Great Actress, bullies her and loses her to Hollywood. Thereafter Jaffe, who resembles Morris Gest, Richard Bennett, Josef von Sternberg and the late David Belasco, produces a succession of failures, ends up in Chicago with money troubles.

When he boards the Twentieth Century Limited for New York with his tippling press agent (Roscoe Karns) and his fretful business manager (Walter Connolly), Lily Garland turns up in the next compartment. Their entire trip is consumed in efforts to get her signature on a contract. The appearance in his car of two guttural-voiced "beards" whirls Jaffe into an inspiration. He will produce the Passion Play of which they are members, adding dervishes, camels, elephants, an ibis and Lily Garland as Magdalen. Jaffe finds a willing backer in a religious fanatic (Etienne Girardot) who has delusions of wealth and sneaks through the train pasting up pious stickers. Quickly the Passion Play collapses, but Jaffe has another trick ready to get his actress back.

If all show people do not behave as these do, it is only because there are not enough Hechts and MacArthurs to teach them how and give them bright lines to speak. Twentieth Century is good fun, slick, wild and improbable. John Barrymore is expert as the producer because, like the rest of his family, he is endowed with a touch of the spurious and theatrical. He postures, tears his hair, wriggles, shouts, jumps, and with a gesture or a lift of the voice delineates such spectacles as a herd of camels, Rev. Mr. Davidson in Rain, Judas strangling himself (with a strand of Magdalen's hair), a door bell going Ting-a-ling-a-ling, an old family servitor, a Southern belle you-alling in crinolines.

Manhattan Melodrama (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) opens spectacularly with the General Slocum disaster out of which are tossed two orphaned boys into Manhattan's East Side. One is studious while the other shoots craps. Years later the student has become district attorney, the crapshooter a top-money gambler. If Jim Wade (William Powell) is straight as a die, Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable) is crooked as his own dice. Gallagher's sleek mistress (Myrna Loy) loves him honestly, leaves him when he refuses to make her an honest woman. In Harlem's Cotton Club she falls in love with District Attorney Wade, is soon married to him.

When Wade runs for governor a disgruntled underling (Thomas Jackson) threatens to expose his wife as the onetime mistress of Gambler Gallagher. When Gallagher coolly kills the would-be tattler, righteous District Attorney Wade gets him convicted, goes triumphantly to Albany as governor. Gallagher refuses his offer to commute the death sentence, marches grimly to the chair. Next day Governor Wade resigns.

Well directed by W. S. Van Dyke, superbly photographed by famed Chinese Cinematographer James Wong Howe, Manhattan Melodrama is first-rate cinema, chiefly important because it marks the elevation to stardom of Myrna Loy.

Born Myrna Williams 29 years ago on a Montana ranch, Myrna Loy was "discovered'' as an obscure sculptress by Rudolph Valentino. Given the Madonna role in Ben Hur, she was told three hours later she was "not the type." For years she played an endless monotony of roles portraying seductive sinuosity. A stranger to Broadway, she has never been east of the Mississippi.

Double Door (Paramount), one of last year's stage hits, is a macabre melodrama of a woman's greed. Like the famed Wendel family, the Van Bretts owe their fortune in Manhattan real estate to a simple maxim: "Never sell." Head of the gloomy house of Van Brett is Spinster Victoria (Mary Morris), a malevolent despot who rules the others with a rod of gold. When her half-brother (Kent Taylor) marries a hospital nurse (Evelyn Venable), Victoria determines that this "upper servant" shall never touch Van Brett money.

To break up the marriage she has the bride trailed by a detective, accuses her of misconduct with a physician friend. The bride defends her virtue, begs her husband to take her away. Before he can, wicked old Victoria gets her alone, pushes her into a secret treasure-vault where she is left to suffocate. When she is rescued, Victoria entombs herself in the vault, crackling insanely over Van Brett heirlooms.

Good shot: Victoria playing an organ amid the mansion's gloom.

Success at Any Price (RKO) is a manual of futility, bitterness and despair, adapted from John Howard Lawson's play Success Story and designed to bludgeon home Hollywood's maxim that money is not everything. Joe Martin (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is prompted by the death of his gangster brother to leave the East Side and rise in the world. Helped by his sweetheart Sarah (Colleen Moore), he gets a job in an advertising agency. His success soon begins when with the aid of a dictionary he turns out better copy than a college-bred rival. By dint of being mean, treacherous, morose and excitable, Joe Martin makes money, usurps the position of the executive (Frank Morgan) who helped him and takes to wife the latter's costly and frivolous mistress (Genevieve Tobin). By this time any cinemagoer may be sure that mercenary Joe Martin will come to a bad end. Dejected by the hollowness of his riches, he shoots himself, recovers, asks and receives Sarah's forgiveness.

Weakened by its off-key conclusion, Success at Any Price is not improved by Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s skin-deep performance. Colleen Moore appears for the first time since she started a comeback in The Power and the Glory (TIME, Aug. 28). Mousy, pallid, indecisive, she is no longer the pert, starry-eyed actress of 'flapper" roles in silent picture days, when exhibitors voted her the industry's No. 1 box office attraction.

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