The New Pictures

Dealers in Death (Topical Films). Cinemaddicts who do not read books, magazines or press reports of Senatorial investigations will doubtless find this picture of the tricks of the munitions trade newsworthy. To others the work of two young independent producers named Harold Kusell and Monroe Shaff will probably seem like cold hash.

Equipped with a commentary written by War Correspondent Burnet Hershey with the editorial advice of Columbia University's Walter B. Pitkin, Dealers in Death illustrates its theme with shots of European munitions factories, portraits of the de Wendels, Zaharoff, Eugene Schneider, the Krupps, together with maps, graphs, battle & atrocity shots. Since it is intended as entertainment, Dealers in Death lacks sincerity as propaganda. Since it contains large quantities of propaganda, it is weak in entertainment. Nonetheless, not even the hackneyed sensationalism of its method can completely conceal the grim power of the picture's meaning.

Behold My Wife (Paramount) is a strange story about an erratic socialite (Gene Raymond) who marries an Indian girl (Sylvia Sidney) to punish his parents for breaking up his romance with a stenographer. Not until his wife appears at a formal reception dressed in beads and pigtails does he make the discovery that the audience has been waiting for: He loves the Indian as much as she loves him.

As conventional in manner as it is bizarre in material. Behold My Wife exemplifies all the traditional paraphernalia of Hollywood society drama, down to the appearance of Monroe Owsley in a champagne & seduction scene.

Babbitt (First National) is a fairly conscientious attempt to give a cinema definition of the proper noun which Sinclair Lewis brilliantly injected into the U. S. language in 1922. George Follansbee Babbitt (Guy Kibbee) is presented in rapid little panels of incidents revealing him as the typical middle-class businessman of the typical U. S. town: at his real-estate business, at his lodge, at his country club, brushing his teeth, haranguing his children, practicing golf shots, and getting into a scrape over a real-estate deal which he is too stupid to realize is crooked. He is a shambling, 200-lb. baby, dandled through life by his wife (Aline MacMahon).

Unfortunately, nothing could be further removed from cinema technique than the Lewis method of building character by the slow accumulation of detail. Mary McCall's screen play, from the adaptation by Tom Reed and Niven Busch, almost does the impossible in knitting the diverse strands into a story. That it has long dull stretches is due partly to the uneven playing of Kibbee and partly to the fact that, when tiresome incidents are presented for the sake of showing how they bore the people in the story, they unhappily produce the same effect upon the audience.

The President Vanishes (Walter Wanger) is built around the idea that Franklin D. Roosevelt has made his job so dramatic that any story about any U. S. President will catch and hold public attention.

Craig Stanley (Arthur Byron), President of the U. S., has apparently been kidnapped. An almond-eyed agitator named Lincoln Lee is mobilizing an army of "grey shirts." A group of powerful malefactors are trying desperately to plunge the U. S. into a European war. The President's wife (Janet Beecher) is wringing her hands, and his secretary (Osgood Perkins) is in jail, accused of the kidnapping. At this juncture, a young secret service man (Paul Kelly) punches his fiancee (Peggy Conklin) on the jaw. "If you will just keep quiet for five minutes, Baby," he says, "everything will be O. K."

The young secret service man knows what he is talking about. His girl obeys him. By the time the picture ends, the agitator is dead, the jingo lobbyists are routed, the President's secretary is enjoying a crooked grin and President Stanley is back on the radio, explaining approximately what has happened.

There is a distinct kinship between The President Vanishes and last year's Gabriel over the White House. Both were based on public interest in the Presidency. Both were the work of Walter Wanger. Both geared unexpectedly into the headlines of the day. While Gabriel over the White House was still being shown, President Roosevelt was taking the U. S. off gold, making stirring radio appeals directly to the people, recruiting his army of jobless for forest work. The President Vanishes was launched just two weeks after Smedley Darlington Butler had startled a Congressional committee and amused the nation with an old-wives' tale about a Fascist Putsch to replace the President with a military dictator (TIME, Dec. 3). The consequent uproar gave Producer Wanger, who believes that Hollywood is terrified by new ideas and hampered by stupid censorship, a convenient chance to state some of his notions on cinemanufacture: "The public is interested in politics . . . eager . . . for themes that dare to grapple with real problems. . . . I would rather film a new idea fairly well than an old idea very well."

The premature pronouncements of incompetent critics, who have suggested that The President Vanishes is a bogey-picture likely to pop the U. S. into rioting and civil war, are rubbish. Nonetheless, the first independent effort by Producer Walter Wanger, who will make six films this year for Paramount release, is an exciting and original Washington melodrama, equipped with mystery, laughter, gunplay and dashes of sophisticated propaganda. Good shot: President Stanley playing rummy with his wife.

The Private Life of Don Juan (London Films) is a witty and pictorially beautiful satire on the middle-age of a roue. Its hero (Douglas Fairbanks) is presented not as a gay young blade but as a seasoned rounder, harassed by debts, hounded by a wife he has deserted, pursued by Sevillian wenches for whom his appetite has faded. To an obscure dancer (Merle Oberon), who catches his eye for a moment, Don Juan repeats his old formula: "That divine hair . . . those lovely stars . . . just a little frightened, gazing at me. You baffle me." When the routine works, he is less pleased than embarrassed.

For the process of mocking the Don Juan legend, Playwrights Frederick Lonsdale and Lajos Biro and Director Alexander Korda chose the apt trick of allowing the legend to mock Don Juan. In his country retreat Don Juan finds a kitchenmaid reading his biography but when he kisses her, she finds him far inferior to the hero of her book. Back in Seville, Don Juan discovers that the gulf between himself and his reputation has grown too wide for him to cross. His dancer is so dazzled by his memory that she no longer recognizes him in person. Finally, there is only one more balcony for Don Juan to scale. In his wife's bedroom, he starts: "That divine hair . . . those lovely stars. . . ." "You told me all that six years ago," says his wife.

When The Private Life of Don Juan had its New York premiere last week, Douglas Fairbanks declined to attend. Audiences will not find it hard to guess why. Except for Vincent Korda's magnificent settings and Georges Perinal's superb photography, the picture in no way resembles old Fairbanks melodrama like The Mark of Zorro and The Thief of Bagdad, as its U. S. distributors are pretend ing. On the contrary it is almost a parody of them. That the perfection of Douglas Fairbanks' performance makes him a little ridiculous may embarrass that actor but it does not prevent The Private Life of Don Juan from being a wry and glittering comedy of bed-manners which civilized audiences should enjoy.

Merle Oberon first came to the notice of U. S. cinemaddicts as Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII. More recently she appeared in The Broken Melody and The Battle (TIME, Dec. 3). Last summer she was reported engaged to Producer Joseph Schenck (United Artists). Last month, arriving in the U. S. for the first time to play the lead in United Artists' Folies Bergere de Paris, she denied the engagement.

Merle Oberon was born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson in 1911 in Tasmania, where her father was a shopkeeper. When he died, she was brought up in Calcutta and Bombay by an uncle in the British Army. At 17 she went to London to try the stage, got a job as a chorus girl in the Cafe de Paris. Director Alexander Korda gave her a bit in Reserved for Ladies, her new name and a long term contract. Possessed of oblique, hazel-colored eyes, a low, clear voice, dark brown hair and delicately mobile features, she is considered by far the most promising Hollywood importation of the current season. She prefers baths to showers, has a quick temper, reads nonfiction, paints her toenails brighter than her fingernails, speaks Hindustani and French, weighs 108 lb., is 5 ft. 2 1/2 in. tall. Her next picture, now on view abroad, is The Scarlet Pimpernel.

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