The New Pictures

The Good Fairy (Universal). The ambition to be what she calls "a good fairy" is aroused in Luisa Ginglebusher (Margaret Sullavan) by an astonishing sequence of events. On the day that she is released from a Budapest orphanage, a friendly waiter (Reginald Owen) promises to smuggle her into a ball. At the ball, she meets an amorous plutocrat (Frank Morgan) whose fluttery advances she stalls off only by saying she is married. When Herr Konrad promises to make her husband immediately and fantastically rich, Luisa realizes her golden opportunity. She seizes a telephone book, mumbles an incantation, shuts her eyes and places her finger on the name of Dr. Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall).

Overwhelmed by a stroke of good fortune which he regards as the reward of his own patience and integrity, Dr. Sporum's first impulse is to buy himself a patented pencil sharpener. His second is to fall in love with his benefactress, who begins to understand the perils of irresponsible benevolence. By the time Dr. Sporum has had his beard shaved off and presented Luisa Ginglebusher with a fox neckpiece, there is nothing much left in The Good Fairy except the scene in which Luisa explains to her three puzzled admirers what she has been up to, straightens out a tangled situation by marrying Dr. Sporum with Herr Konrad for best man.

If the cinema version of The Good Fairy lacks the sophistication which Author Ferenc Molnar wrote into his play from which it was derived, it is all the more amusing because of the omission. An example of Hollywood's newly discovered ability to scour without scratching, it emerges as a slight comedy which is no less wise for being less cynical and one which is performed with exactly the right blend of nervousness and imperturbability by all the members of its cast. Good shot: Herr Konrad giving his order for supper to Luisa's waiter, who thinks she has no business in a private dining room.

Hei Tiki (Alexander Markey) belongs to that class of films which theatre managers advertise with lobby displays of excelsior and old straw, to represent South Sea Island residences. The cast contains The Virgin Bride, Her Lover and Her Father, all performed by natives. There is a volcano in the background. The dialog is entirely unintelligible.

Every picture like Hei Tiki brings with it the hope that, in their painstaking investigation of Pacific nooks and crannies, cinema producers have at last discovered one island where the aborigines' routine is distinct from that pursued in all the other ocean fly specks. In the case of Hei Tiki, a widely exploited picture made on The Isle of Ghosts, New Zealand, by the one-time editor of Pearson's Magazine, these hopes seemed reasonable and it is therefore the more painful that they are not realized. In Hei Tiki, as usual, the chieftain's daughter takes up with a rival tribal chief's son. Her camera-conscious father shakes his battle-ax, the black warriors jump into their canoes and there is the customary stone and mud-pie fight around the village walls. "Hei Tiki" is the love charm which girls of the Maori tribe wear around their necks. Worst shot: a group of natives with their backs to the camera yammering around a pile of holy sticks.

Under Pressure (Fox). Every Hollywood lot contains one piece of bric-a-brac which is maintained, long after its usefulness is over, in order to amaze impressionable tourists. Paramount has the enormous imitation ocean liner which was originally used for a Fatty Arbuckle comedy. On the Fox lot, the prize prop is the set which was used last summer in the manufacture of this picture. A painstaking replica of a vehicular tunnel in the process of construction, it contains real narrow-gauge railroad tracks, 450 feet of wooden walls, enormous quantities of mud, a watering attachment for the picture's climax when the walls cave in and the river floods the workmen drilling under it.

As in most such occupational surveys, Under Pressure is at its best when it is really revealing the mechanics of its subject : workmen descending to their jobs in rickety elevators; machines which keep them supplied with compressed air; decompression chambers to revive them when they emerge exhausted; the hole in the tunnel wall through which, after the air has escaped in a "blow," the river comes roaring in. Much less impressive is a flimsy superstructure of plot built around the rivalry between the gang digging under the East River from the Manhattan side, headed by Charles Bickford, and the Brooklyn gang headed by Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. Lowe and McLaglen, with no apparent decrease in their self-confidence, continue the marathon of "oh-yeah" repartee which has been their stock in trade since What Price Glory? (1926). Good shot: McLaglen's workmen escaping in their supply train when dynamiting starts a fire in the tunnel.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Universal). As all his faithful readers know, Charles Dickens got to the 23rd chapter of this serial novel, wrote of a strange greybeard named Datchery who comes home to supper, makes a cryptic chalk mark on his cupboard "and then falls to with an appetite." Dickens died the day after penning those words. Ever since it has been anybody's privilege to give The Mystery of Edwin Drood a conclusion. Universal does so in the second picture it has entered in the current Dickens revival. (The first: Great Expectations--TIME, Oct. 29.)

A furious December storm breaks over the cathedral town of Cloisterham. Dark-skinned, faun-eyed Neville Landless (Douglass Montgomery) declares: "I . . . don't . . . like . . . it." A disreputable crone tells Edwin Drood (David Manners) that his is a "threatened" name. Next day Drood is missing. Suspicion falls upon Landless, a hot-tempered youth who has come from Ceylon to Cloisterham to study with Rev. Mr. Crisparkle. Enamored of Drood's fiancee, Rosa Bud (Heather Angel), Landless was supposedly the last man to see Drood alive. And Drood's uncle, Mr. Jasper (Claude Rains) reminds everyone that in an altercation during a drinking bout, Landless drew a knife on Drood. But much of the mystery of Edwin Drood is dispelled for cinemaddicts by the behavior of shifty-eyed Jasper, cathedral choirmaster, who secretly visits an opium den, gets a stonemason named Durdles to show him through the cathedral crypt by night, and otherwise gives himself away.

That Drood was murdered by Jasper is the theory projected in most of the eight books, five plays and 80 articles that have been written on the subject since Dickens died in 1870. That verdict was handed down in 1914 after a literary mock trial at which Gilbert Keith Chesterton was judge, George Bernard Shaw a juror. A notable dissident, however, is Stephen Leacock. This humorist and McGill University economist believes that for Drood to be murdered is too obviously unmysterious. According to Dickensian Leacock, Drood managed to escape a murderous assault by Jasper, but the choirmaster, in an opium dream, fancied he was accomplishing the murder nonetheless. Drood disappeared, bided his time, finally confronted Jasper who broke down, confessed. Mr. Leacock points out that this solution would have permitted Dickens a happy ending, with marriages and children all around.

If the ending concocted for Universal by four scenarists including John L. Balderston (Berkeley Square) is somewhat obvious, the picture is nevertheless thoroughly entertaining, full of Mid-Victorian atmosphere, good acting, and Dickensian makeup. (The cast used 2,200 lb. of grease paint and false hair.) Startling shot: Jasper and Durdles being stoned by an urchin named Deputy who squeals: Winnie-winnie-wah!

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