The New Pictures

The Scarlet Pimpernel (London Films). If there is anything better suited to the cinema than the spectacle of a guillotine, dripping with blood and buzzing up & down like a sewing machine, it is the spectacle of Leslie Howard in 18th Century coattails, making gestures of polite affection toward Merle Oberon. The Scarlet Pimpernel, derived from Baroness Orczy's famed best-seller (3,000,000 copies), contains both, picturesquely inlaid against an Alexander Korda background of tumbrels, old inns, the coffee rooms at Black's Club and Citizen Robespierre, snarling in falsetto.

A scarlet pimpernel is not, as U. S. cinemaddicts may suppose, either a childhood disease or a disgraceful occupation. It is a little wildflower which Sir Percy Blakeney (Leslie Howard), head of a gang of altruistic milords who consider it their duty to rescue French aristocrats imperilled by the Revolution, uses as his signature. Versatile, altruistic, Sir Percy kidnaps deserving members of nobility on their way from dungeon to execution block. On business trips to France he disguises himself with a putty nose and the long skirts of a peasant crone. In London, visiting his tailor or attending prizefights, he behaves like an effeminate fop. The almost superhuman difficulties of his undertakings are increased for him by domestic troubles. He suspects his wife (Merle Oberon) of being sympathetic to the new regime in Paris.

Lady Blakeney is actually guiltless when her husband first suspects her but circumstances force her into a misplay. Her French brother is in danger. The bad Ambassador of the French Republic (Raymond Massey) promises to spare his life if Lady Blakeney will help him unmask the Scarlet Pimpernel. Lady Blakeney does so, but when she learns that the Pimpernel is Sir Percy, she has a fever of remorse. She follows Sir Percy to France, gets there in time to see him neatly foil a firing squad.

The chief merit of Alexander Korda's historical researches (Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Don Juan) is the quality of adult humor, with which he endows them. Like his previous works, The Scarlet Pimpernel is a lavish period piece, packed with all the paraphernalia of an epoch that the cinema has neglected since D. W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm. Nonetheless, its most engaging moments occur when Sir Percy, puttering in London, chuckles at Romney's portrait of his wife, sneers at the cut of the Prince Regent's newest coat sleeves, describes his necktie as his stock-in-trade. A brisk light-hearted and enormously romantic tableau, The Scarlet Pimpernel should sprout immediately on lists of worthy cinemas compiled out of respect for decency or for plain good taste. Good shot: Sir Percy ingratiating himself with a sentry at the gates of Paris by showing him a switch made of dead patricians' pigtails.

Rumba (Paramount). Carole Lombard, a $20,000,000 American in Cuba, is sorry Dancer George Raft was chicaned by a counterfeit lottery ticket bearing the same number as her genuine winning ticket. She goes to his dressing room to offer him the money she won, but he misunderstands. Months later after Raft has discovered and made his fortune out of the rumba, a process that involves a good deal of exciting music and exposed brunette flesh, the story wriggles up to a climax in which gangsters threaten to shoot Raft during the opening dance of his new show. His partner wilts. Miss Lombard steps from her box and joins him in the rumba. Somehow this frail anecdote is definitely pleasant, brightened with the tropical costumes and faces and Marion Gering's vivid direction.

Devil Dogs of the Air (Warner) is an investigation of perhaps the only branch of the U. S. flying service that has hitherto escaped the attention of the cinema-- aviators of the U. S. Marine Corps. A hard-boiled lieutenant (Pat O'Brien) gruffly supervises the training of a cocky stunt pilot (James Cagney). By the time the stunt pilot's initiation is over, he has acquired a thorough knowledge of formation flying, traces of esprit de corps, the undivided attention of his superior officer's intended fiancee (Margaret Lindsay).

The recruiting-poster technique which Warner Brothers perfected in Flirtation Walk has two main advantages. Enlisting the aid of the U. S. Government cuts production costs appreciably. A foreword expressing effusive thanks gives the picture a patina of spurious patriotism which helps sell it to the public. In Devil Dogs, first Cosmopolitan production released since the Hearst cinema producing organization was transferred from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to Warner, these advantages, combined with some of the most exciting stunt flying seen in the cinema since Hell's Angels, were correctly deemed sufficient to compensate for the lack of anything which might be construed as an original narrative. Best shot: an aviator purporting to be James Cagney, but actually one of the anonymous stunt flyers who helped make Devil Dogs, impudently bouncing his plane over the ambulance that has been sent out to save him.

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