The New Pictures

Naughty Marietta (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is Victor Herbert's 25-year-old operetta, revived as the vehicle for the first important cinema performance of Baritone Nelson Eddy. It concerns a French Princess who, to avoid a manage de convenance to a Spanish grandee, disguises herself as a peasant girl and joins a boatload of female emigrants whom the King is shipping to New Orleans as brides for his colonists. In New Orleans, Marietta (Jeanette MacDonald) promptly makes the acquaintance of a dashing young soldier (Eddy) in a coonskin cap. There are obstacles to their romance: to avoid marrying a colonist, Marietta gives the Governor (Frank Morgan) a lurid account of her past. Just when it occurs to the soldier to regard this as fiction, the Spanish Grandee arrives to carry his fiancee back to France. Nonetheless, when last seen, Capt. Warrington and Marietta are riding off happily together through some mountains while yodeling "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life."

This preposterous scrap of Americana is so well suited to the needs of sentimental cinema that it may well make cinemaddicts wonder why Hollywood's operetta impresarios bother to invent stodgy plots for their productions instead of adapting the up-to-date inventions of the past. Admirers of Victor Herbert will not need to be reminded that the score of Naughty Marietta contains, in addition to "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life," such minor classics as "I'm Falling in Love with Someone," "The Italian Street Song," and "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp." Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sing them to perfection and Naughty Marietta can be applauded, like One Night of Love (TIME, Sept. 14), as a worthy example of what operatic cinema can amount to.

As personable a singer as his most serious Hollywood rival, Lawrence Tibbett, Nelson Eddy arrived in cinema by an even more circuitous route. Born in Providence, R. I., the son of a manufacturer of equipment for submarines, he made his debut as a soprano in the choir of Grace Church. After a grammar & night-school education, he went to work, first as a telephone operator in an iron works factory, later in the art department of the Philadelphia Press, stayed with that paper, the Evening Ledger and Bulletin for five years as reporter and copyreader. Later he took to writing advertising, got fired from N. W. Ayer & Son for paying too much attention to music.

The legend that Nelson Eddy learned operatic arias from listening to phonograph records is only partly true. His first teacher, David Scull Bispham, schooled him for one year before he made his first stage appearance at a Philadelphia benefit show in 1922. He sang for the Savoy Opera Company, Philadelphia's Civic Opera, made his New York debut in Wozzeck in 1931. In the next two years Baritone Eddy's reputation as a concert singer steadily increased. When in 1931 he gave a concert at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium to an audience trained to appreciate manner and appearance as well as vocal qualities, he made a prodigious impression. He got 18 encores, a screen test that led to bit parts in Dancing Lady and Student Tour before he was chosen for the lead in Naughty Marietta. More amazed than delighted by his sudden success, Baritone Eddy, now 33, plans to continue his concert stage career while performing in cinema. In Manhattan for a concert fortnight ago he gave his views on Hollywood and music: "Opera in the movies? ... It isn't entertaining enough. . . . The movies have proved a splendid school for opera people. . . ."

Mississippi (Paramount). To many a cinemaddict any W. C. Fields picture is a good one. This musical film also contains Crooner Bing Crosby, who with bland face and bland voice has recently impersonated such characters as a sailor, a Princeton student, a crooner. Together, Fields and Crosby add certain novel elements to Mississippi's "you-all," hoop skirt & julep plot as taken from a Booth Tarkington play.

Because Crosby, a Yankee, lazily, dislikes gunplay, he declines to duel with a Southern blackguard. In the next few minutes he loses his fiancee, excites the love of her sister (Joan Bennett), is summarily ousted from the plantation of their father. He joins a show boat run by Fields, a Mississippi River commodore who claims to have been an oldtime Indian fighter. When Crosby succeeds in publicly mauling and accidentally shooting a bully, Fields improvises a few lies, turns the crooner into "The Notorious Col. Steele, the Singing Killer."

Spacious, handsome and rambling as a musicomedy should be, Mississippi contains an engaging quintet of singing pickaninnies called The Cabin Kids and three good songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart: "It's Easy to Remember," "Down By the River," "Soon." Fields is at his best in a poker game sequence in which he frantically draws ace after ace when he already holds four. Curiously for cinema, Joan Bennett is cast in a role which requires her to make the initial declaration of love, the first request for a kiss.

Laddie (RKO). The best-selling novels of the late Gene Stratton-Porter have generated some of the most outlandish ballyhoo in the weird history of cinema promotion. To honor A Girl of the Limberlost, Indiana set aside 75 miles of State highway running by the Stratton-Porter home, from Geneva to Rome City, called it The Limberlost Trail. In 1925 when F. B. 0. produced Keeper of the Bees hundreds of schoolchildren were persuaded to plant Gene Stratton-Porter memorial trees. Last week's ballyhoo for Laddie was in the tradition of its predecessors.

In its prodigious "press book," full of ideas for Laddie exhibitors, RKO's publicity department urged them to employ an expert horsewoman to ride sidesaddle through the streets dressed as Pamela, encouraged libraries to sponsor Laddie contests. The premiere of Laddie was held in the capital of Author Stratton-Porter's home State, at the Circle Theatre in Indianapolis where her photograph hangs in the upstairs lounge with those of Tom Taggart. Benjamin Harrison, Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser and James Whitcomb Riley. Present at the opening were a quorum of Indianapolis socialites, Mrs. Stratton-Porter's onetime secretary Mrs. Frank Wallace. Child Actress Virginia Weidler, featured in the picture, and Author Stratton-Porter's two superannuated sisters. Mrs. Ada May Wilson and Mrs. Florence Compton. Shivering in the glare of floodlights that turned their wrinkled faces blue, they quavered their opinions of the picture: "Lovely, lovely!" "It's the best movie of one of Sister's books we've seen. . . ."

More disinterested cinemaddicts are not likely to concur. A virulently wholesome tale of Indiana farm life in the 1870's, Laddie shows how Little Sister (Weidler) so bewitches a visiting British snob that he permits his daughter Pamela (Gloria Stuart) to marry Little Sister's big brother Laddie (John Beal). Director George Stevens handled his material with sensible restraint and Actress Weidler, 8, is less objectionable than most of Shirley Temple's imitators. Typical shot: Laddie secretly meeting Pamela in the woods while Little Sister hides behind a bush.

Life Begins at 40 (Fox). This time the town is called Plainview and Will Rogers is a country newspaper editor. The younglove interest is supplied by a svelte school mistress (Rochelle Hudson) and a handsome youth (Richard Cromwell) fresh out of jail. The complications are contributed by a tyrannical, politically-minded bank president (George Barbier) whose institution Cromwell is supposed to have robbed and whose shifty-eyed son is in love with the same school teacher.

Rogers films are less notable for their plots than for the ability of the Fox director-in-charge to enrich each new effort with a series of irrationally diverting incidents and a crew of colorful, highly entertaining characters, most of them no-accounts. Chief among such characters in Life Begins at 40 are blond, drawling Sterling Holloway, and long-beaked, shambling Slim Summerville, whose hobby, when sufficiently awake, is whittling whatever piece of furniture comes quickest to hand. As further circus material Director Marshall managed to round up, in the guise of hog-calling relatives of the indigent Summerville, the most amazing collection of rapscallion hillbillies and their weak-chinned womenfolk that has ever driven down a cinemountain. Good shot: Summerville, at a party and on his best behavior in topper and cutaway, trying to restrain himself from whittling at the wooden leg of the man next to him.

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