The New Pictures

Evelyn Prentice (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In Manhattan the characters in this picture read Mr. Hearst's American, lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria, take tea at the Plaza, go to Barney's to get drunk. Pullmans carry them to Boston where they stop at the Copley Plaza. Peppered with such initial bits of information, cinemaddicts may be pardoned for wrongly concluding that in Evelyn Prentice they are witnessing a new cinema effort to combine advertising with amusement. Such touches are merely inserted to prove that John Prentice (William Powell) and his wife (Myrna Loy) are cinema patricians. Since cinema patricians are incorrigibly ill-behaved, it is not surprising when John Prentice gives a wrist watch to a lady he has defended in a criminal action and when Evelyn Prentice takes up with a blackmailing poet.

As soon as it becomes apparent that Evelyn Prentice has a plot, seasoned cinemaddicts will easily guess the rest. The fact that the blackmailing poet keeps a revolver and a diary in his desk clearly indicates a murder to come. That John Prentice is a crack lawyer suggests a courtroom scene in which he will extricate his wife from difficulties. A squeaking little Prentice (Cora Sue Collins) guarantees that her parents will be estranged and reconciled. Although Evelyn Prentice is far from being an experiment, in either art or advertising, its conventional coils are expertly twisted and untwisted. For the most likable starring team now functioning in Hollywood, it makes an agreeable, if undistinguished, sequel to The Thin Man. Good shot: John Prentice helping his butler mix the cocktails.

Kid Millions (Samuel Goldwyn). A Brooklyn tugboat youth named Eddie (Eddie Cantor) inherits $77,000,000 from an uncle who was an Egyptologist. When he goes to Egypt to collect his legacy, his task is complicated by an unscrupulous Virginia grandee, a male and female racketeer (Warren Hymer and Ethel Merman), a naive agent of his solicitors who loves the Virginian's niece (Ann Sothern). On the boat, Eddie barely escapes death at the hands of the racketeers. In Egypt he is lured to a sheik's palace, narrowly misses being boiled in oil by the sheik, being murdered by the sheik's prospective son-in-law. He escapes in an airplane. Safe at home, he uses his millions to build an immense ice-cream factory where he feeds an army of young ragamuffins.

The finale of Kid Millions is an elaborate sequence in color, showing chorus girls on skates spinning around a gigantic ice-cream freezer. The best songs in the picture, written by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, are "Okay Toots," and "An Earful of Music." Sample jokes:

P:Eddie, looking at burning incense: "What are you cooking, a beef stew?"

P:Sheik: "An oath was taken." Eddie: "I didn't take it. Search me."

The White Parade (Fox). Dedicated to the memory of Florence Nightingale, this picture makes a sincere effort not only to dramatize but to glorify the profession of nursing. That it fails to do the first may be because Rian James's story, covering the entire training period of a probationary nurse, seems more like a sentimental prospectus than a moving picture. That it fails to do the second may be because pictures like Night Nurse, Life Begins, Registered Nurse have already acquainted the cinema public with the notion that a pretty girl in a nurse's uniform can be counted on to perform superhuman feats of courage, loyalty, good humor, devotion to duty and dexterity with any item of hospital apparatus from an ether mask to a bedpan.

That The White Parade is still a more than usually handsome and well-acted program picture is due to the facts that Producer Jesse Lasky has a flair for surface values and that Loretta Young, when she can control the wobblings of her lower lip, is an actress as skillful and sensitive as she is presentable. The best moments in The White Parade are those in which she is conducting a love affair with a Boston polo player (John Boles), which begins as a joke and ends in what most cinemaddicts are likely to mistake for tragedy. Good shot: Jane Darwell, as a gruff head nurse, persuading her superior not to oust Loretta two weeks before graduation.

The First World War (Fox) starts in 1895 with Germany's old Prince von Bismarck ("The Iron Chancellor") saluting for a cameraman. In 1904, the Prince of Wales is playing soldiers with his sister Mary and brother Albert, the Kaiser is visiting an orphanage, the Tsar is praying for his sick son, Alexis. Chapter II deals with the Balkan Wars in 1912. Chapter III shows the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the declarations of war. The eight chapters that follow are packed with sequences so exciting in themselves and so lightly related to each other that it is almost impossible to pick out individually memorable shots. Among the best are: General Gallieni's army hurrying out of Paris to the First Battle of the Marne in Renault taxis; the Austrian flagship St. Stephan sinking in a flat Adriatic dotted with drowning bodies; the rough pencil line of a French army drawn across the snow-covered Vosges Mountains; a U. S. division crossing No Man's Land through machinegun fire; the captain of a German submarine ordering his crew to discharge a torpedo; Lenin waving his hands and snickering. The picture ends in a scornful flicker of contemporary newsreels superimposed on the background of two soldiers shaking hands on Armistice Day.

In form. The First World War resembles earlier compilations of newsreels and official moving pictures dealing with the same subject (Forgotten Men, The Big Drive). In quality it is superior because it is more complete, better edited. It includes altogether 1,132 sequences, four times as many as most feature pictures. The opening shot is considered by its producers to be the earliest moving picture of historical value now extant.* It was made by an unknown German cameraman when Bismarck was 80. Like the book of photo graphs which inspired it and gave it its name, The First World War is accompanied by comments written by one-legged War Veteran Laurence Stallings, who helped Truman Talley to produce the pic ture. As spoken by Announcer Pedro De Cordoba these give it an ironic impact and coherence that its predecessors have lacked. Whether The First World War makes audiences remember its subject with loathing or with nostalgia is a question. What seems more certain is that both as a contribution to history and an experiment in cinema technique, it will be one of the memorable pictures of its season.

* Earliest comparable shot in the U. S. shows William McKinley's inauguration in 1897. Most early moving pictures of news events which might now have historic importance have been carelessly destroyed. Newsreels, as such, did not begin to flourish until 1912.

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