The New Pictures

The Girl from Missouri (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). At the outset of this picture, Eadie (Jean Harlow) announces her ambition to stay pure and marry a millionaire. That she finally gets to the altar in that condition can be chalked up as a victory for Censor Joseph Breen, despite the fact that Eadie's character is such as to make ridiculous anything she thinks worth defending.

For cinemaddicts who rate entertainment above ennoblement, Eadie should be an entrancing heroine. From a Midwest roadhouse, where her stepfather urges her to be obliging to his patrons, her desire for advancement carries her to a Manhattan penthouse where, at an orgy, she meets T. R. Paige (Lionel Barrymore). She trails him to Palm Beach and there scrambles into a romance with his son (Franchot Tone), who advertises unsuccessfully the advantages of misbehavior.

Old T. R. naturally considers Eadie a guttersnipe adventuress. Young T. R. decides to marry her. Paige senior arranges a scene in which Eadie, back in Manhattan, is publicly photographed in negligee in the embrace of a grinning stranger. Eadie retaliates in kind when old T. R. is about to sail on the Aquitania for an international gathering. In a split second she appears in his cabin in her underclothes, gives him a mighty hug while press photographers do the rest. All this feverish by-play ends in a curious reconciliation scene. Eadie gets drunk. To sober her up, young T. R. Paige pops her under a shower, proposes for the second time.

When Jean Harlow first appeared in cinema, half undressed, as the sex-menace in Hell's Angels, it was clear that Holly wood would find a niche for her. The remarkable thing about her subsequent career is that, instead of becoming Hollywood's No. 1 siren, she has become its No. 1 comedienne. In The Girl from Missouri, written by Anita Loos & John Emerson, Lionel Barrymore wiggles his eyebrows as skillfully as ever, and Franchot Tone, as usual, gives an ingratiatingly juvenile performance. But it is the presence of Jean Harlow that supplies the picture with its vital humor. Good shot: Eadie jumping off the Paige yacht when she learns that the youngster she mistook for a bookkeeper is old T. R.'s son.

Friends of Mr. Sweeney (Warner). Asaph Holliday (Charles Ruggles), hero of this picture, is a journalistic guppy, small, ashamed and ludicrous, writing timid editorials in a journal of opinion called The Balance. When his old college mate, Rixey (Eugene Pallette), arrives in town, a change takes place in Asaph. He calls up his assistant (Ann Dvorak) and orders her to come to dinner. At a swank night club, to which he gains admittance by saying to the doorman "We are friends of Mr. Sweeney," he gambles coolly with $1,000 chips under the impression that they cost $1. Finally, with inebriated courage, he decides to rewrite his insincere eulogy of a crooked politician in the form of a philippic. This leads to a scene in the offices of The Balance, in which Asaph Holliday not only rewrites his editorial but also outwits a bandit.

In If I Had a Million, Charles Ruggles was a timid china salesman who, when he inherited a fortune, took a walking stick to work, used it to smash his fragile merchandise. Since then the Ruggles inhibitions have always been defeated but the spectacle is no less amusing. Friends of Mr. Sweeney, based on the novel of Elmer Davis, is one of the pleasantest minor comedies of the season. Good shot: the bandit (Harry Tyler) lounging on a table at The Balance as he explains the methods of his profession.

Handy Andy (Fox). Tossed into jail for clubbing a tango dancer during the New Orleans Mardi Gras, Andrew Yates (Will Rogers) is not ashamed when his wife (Peggy Wood) pays him a call. "Don't worry about me," he says. "I've got a wooden pistol whittled out already." Given a pair of knickerbockers to wear for golf, he calls them "rompers," describes his clubs as "bats."

To Will Rogers enthusiasts such shambling wisecracks embroidered with winks. leers and little stutters, will doubtless make Handy Andy seem excruciatingly amusing. To other cinemaddicts the pic ture will be only an amiable scrap of Hollywood jocosity, distinguished by the fact that in it the most widely syndicated U. S. newspaper columnist refrains from audible comment on national affairs. Handy Andy's story concerns a retired druggist who, bored with leisure, outwits his socially ambitious wife by following her suggestion that he learn to play. Good shot: homesick Andrew Yates wandering into a New Orleans drugstore in search of congenial company. Elmer and Elsie (Paramount) is an awkward adaptation of George Kaufman's & Marc Connelly's play To the Ladies, built around the painful situation of a man (George Bancroft) who, having memorized a banquet speech from a manual of after-dinner oratory, finds that the speaker who precedes him has learned the same one. Elmer's wife Elsie (Frances Fuller) saves the situation, later saves Elmer his job as foreman in a piano factory. Worst and most frequent shot: Elmer explaining to Elsie that, "It is a man's world."

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