The New Pictures

Paris Interlude (MGM). The No. 2 heroine of this picture is a standard cut-out from all Hollywood's style sheets, the loyal girl friend. When in Paris Interlude, Julie (Madge Evans) gets drunk in a saloon, Cassie (Una Merkel) helps her home. When Julie's boy friend Sam (Otto Kruger) flies off for China, Cassie comforts her. When Sam has been reported dead, Cassie tells Julie's nicest suitor (Robert Young) how best to further his cause. True to cinema type, Cassie talks tough and, has no male associates of her own. That she may get one is indicated at the end of the picture, when Sam comes back wounded and Cassie talks him out of breaking up Julie's nuptials.

Smartly adapted by Wells Root from All Good Americans, Paris Interlude is a peewee inspection of French bars and barflies in the Lindbergh era. In it Otto Kruger, the most bedridden leading man in Hollywood, croaks through his pillowcase, Edward Brophy shuffles through the role of a disheveled newshawk and Madge Evans gives one more of the ingratiating performances which have lately made her the busiest ingenue in Hollywood. Good sequence: a fashion show, designed by MGM's famed Gilbert Adrian.

Before she became a cinema star, Madge Evans was a photographer's model. A cinema executive saw her pictured in an advertisement for Fairy Soap, got her a part in The Sign of the Cross. That was in 1914, when she was 5. Star of the picture was William Farnum. Madge Evans became the Shirley Temple of the silent cinema. When she was 10 her career, as such, was over.

In 1924, Madge Evans tried a come-back with Richard Barthelmess in Classmates. When it failed, she got William A. Brady to help her get stage parts. She was playing in George Kelly's Philip Goes Forth when MGM used her as background in a screen test for another actor in the cast. The test came out so well she got a contract. After her teeth had been straightened, her hair dyed and bobbed, she attained the distinction of being the only child actor to succeed in cinema as an adult.

Madge Evans now has a long-term contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. An expert badminton player, she owns the largest collection of pajamas in Hollywood, prefers to sleep in a nightgown. Unmarried, she lives in a ten-room Spanish house with her mother and brother, likes practical jokes, plays golf constantly and poorly, is often seen with Tom Gallery, matchmaker for Hollywood's Legion Stadium. Healthy, talkative, blue-eyed, she studies in bed, considers The Little Duchess (1917) her best picture.

Hat, Coat and Glove (RKO). A married woman (Barbara Robbins) visits a young artist's flat, carelessly leaves her beret behindc Her lawyer-husband (Ricardo Cortez) goes to the flat, finds there the artist's discarded mistress (Dorothy Burgess), tries unsuccessfully to prevent her from shooting herself, departs without noticing that he has left his glove on the floor. The hat, the glove and the overcoat on which his mistress expires are introduced as evidence when the artist (John Beal) is tried for her murder. His attorney is the husband of the lady who owns the beret. He has undertaken the case at the request of his wife who has promised to discontinue her affair with the defendant.

By the time Hat, Coat and Glove has worked up to the courtroom scene it is clear that Lawyer Mitchell has at hand the materials for a lively and dramatic defense. He makes good use of them. Since no one in the courtroom knows about his call at the artist's apartment he is able to confound the district attorney by fitting the glove to his own hand to prove that it was not necessarily owned by the defendant. When a boy has wrongly identified the artist as the man he saw on the steps of the apartment building, Lawyer Mitchell arouses chuckles by putting on a coat, causing the boy to change his mind.

A glib, ingenious and careful combination of triangle play and courtroom melodrama, Hat, Coat and Glove received Certificate No. 54 from Censor Joseph Breen of the Hays' organization, although it depicts an erring wife rewarded, an adulterer unpunished and a gin-soaked wench's impenitent self-destruction. Good shot: Lawyer Mitchell's surprise witness explaining why the beret found in the apartment might have fitted the dead girl because "the less they fit, the better they fit."

Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (20th Century). Traveling from the Orient, a young woman and her aunt arrive in Paris, register at a fashionable hotel. The young woman goes out on a brief errand and when she returns she finds her aunt has disappeared. The hotel manager is courteous but he cannot remember ever having seen the young woman or her aunt before. Their names are mysteriously missing from the register which the young woman well remembers signing. Their bedroom has suddenly become a vacant storage room and of their baggage there is no trace. All this mystification, it finally develops, is due to the fact that the aunt, during the young woman's absence, has died of cholera. Her corpse has been quickly and quietly disposed of to avoid a panic.

Such is an old and celebrated legend, repeated so often that many a credulous person considers it true. As a work of fiction it most recently appeared in Alexander Woollcott's While Rome Burns. To anyone except a Hollywood cinema producer, it might have seemed difficult as well as superfluous to rearrange such a gruesome anecdote to include: an Indian potentate with foxhound jowls; his sordid butlers, Singh and Hassan; a cargo of Siberian furs; Charles Butterworth; and Captain Hugh ("Bulldog") Drummond (Ronald Colman), taking his life in his hands as lightly as the cigarets he lights in moments of emergency. But to Producer Zanuck such exaggeration of the legened offered no great difficulties. The niece is beautiful Lola Fields (Loretta Young). The aunt is the wife of a sea captain who, carrying furs from Siberia, has stopped at Port Said to land a sailor dying of cholera. The Prince is a scalawag who, having invested his fortune in the furs, is determined to land them at the risk of starting an epidemic in London. He thinks nothing of kidnapping first the honest captain, then the captain's wife, then their lovely niece to facilitate his project. Nonchalant, verbose and inconsiderate, "Bulldog" Drummond prevents him from doing anything of the sort. He is aided by his friend Algy (Charles Butterworth), whose part in the proceedings is comic since they happen on his wedding night.

An example of old-style cinemelodrama, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back is an entertaining Hollywood elaboration, replete with London fogs, funny policemen, disgruntled Scotland Yard inspectors. Good shot: Hassan and Singh rearing their ugly heads behind the sofa on which Lola Fields has fallen into an unwary doze.

Ladies Should Listen (Paramount). "Have you ever gone through the telephone book, page by page?" asks Julian de Lussac (Cary Grant) in this picture. "No, but I am reading Anthony Adverse," replies his friend Paul Vernet (Edward Everett Horton). This is a fair sample of the comedy in Ladies Should Listen, a cinematic fly spec, full of old gags and useless information. It includes such familiar figures of bedroom farce as a funny valet, a South American business man who correctly suspects his wife of misconduct, a short sighted girl (Nydia Westman) who trips over rugs.

One ingredient of Ladies Should Listen should interest seasoned cinemaddicts, Charles Ray, whose characterizations of shy rustics made him one of the richest U.S. cinemactors twelve years ago, functions as a doorman devoted to a telephone operator.

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