The New Pictures

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Gaumont British) follows the formula of old Hollywood gangster pictures in its climactic scene which shows London's Wapping transformed into a shambles when the police bombard a gang of anarchists in their hideaway. Nonetheless, the picture can by no means be pigeonholed as a feeble foreign imitation of the films which many cinemaddicts found among the most satisfactory ever made in the U. S. Alfred Hitchcock's direction, in which the story is told in sharp, abbreviated sequences gathering speed steadily toward their explosive climax, makes The Man Who Knew Too Much one of the neatest melodramas of the year. Furthermore it includes the first English-speaking cinema performance of Peter Lorre, who, as the chubby, anarchist fiend, enacts a part which admirers are likely to consider comparable to his famed portrayal of the sadist hero of M.

Based on a story by Charles Bennett and D. B. Wyndham Lewis, The Man Who Knew Too Much starts calmly enough in St. Moritz where Lawrence (Leslie Banks), his wife (Edna Best) and their small daughter (Nova Pilbeam) are performing winter sports. A fellow guest at their hotel is mysteriously shot. Dying, he begs Lawrence to find a code message in his room, deliver it to the British Foreign Office. Lawrence finds the message but before he can deliver it, the assassins have kidnapped his daughter, threatened to kill her if Lawrence carries out his mission.

A sense of the reality of Lawrence's predicament grows on the audience as the audience sees it growing on Lawrence. When emissaries from the Foreign Office demand the note which the mysterious abductors have forbidden Lawrence to give up, it gradually becomes established that his daughter has become a trump card in a plot to assassinate a diplomat whose death may mean a war. Following the clue he discovers in the note, Lawrence goes to Wapping, tiptoes into a deserted church, finds himself trapped by a fat smiling monster (Lorre) who orders the little girl brought in. The company sit down to listen to a broadcast of an Albert Hall concert at whose crescendo the anarchists' triggerman will fire his revolver. Good shot: Mrs. Lawrence, in the audience at Albert Hall, watching a gunbarrel emerge slowly from a curtain.

Private Worlds (Paramount). Said Ernst Lubitsch, onetime director and now Paramount's new production chief, last fortnight: "Eight hundred motion pictures are produced in Hollywood each year. That means that some one must strive to contrive to have the boy meet the girl in a different way than 799 others have related it. Reduced to elementals, that is our problem." If it did nothing else, Private Worlds would be notable for the solution which it offers to the perplexity which caused Producer Lubitsch to forget his grammar. The boy and the girl meet in an insane asylum where he (Charles Boyer) is the superintendent and she (Claudette Colbert) a diligent psychiatrist.

Based on Phyllis Bottome's best seller of a year ago, Private Worlds illustrates the sad truism that the distinction between doctors and their crackpots is often dangerously thin. Superintendent Monet has in tow his sister Claire (Helen Vinson), a nymphomaniac-murderess, whose misbehavior has prejudiced him against unattached young women generally. Psychiatrist Everest is living in what she calls a "ghost-world," still enamoured of a soldier shot for cowardice in the War. The efforts of these two to conquer their neuroses keep the asylum in an uproar. Before they succeed, Claire Monet has a liaison with a young neurologist (Joel McCrea) which sends his wife (Joan Bennett) into a bad fit of the stammers. A young maniac has snapped the superintendent's wrist. The matron of the institution has been discharged and rehired.

In The President Vanishes, his first picture for Paramount release (TIME, Dec. 17), Producer Walter Wanger attacked the subject of politics, tabooed by most of his confreres. Serious treatment of psychiatry is equally unheard of in the cinema because, while likely to baffle many cinemaddicts, it may fail to please those tories who still cling stubbornly to the creed that all films are made by and for intellectual ten-year-olds. If Private Worlds fails to earn its way at the box office, it would be unfortunate. As intelligent as it is unconventional, brilliantly acted, and directed by Gregory La Cava, it contrives to make the minor maladjustments of its leading characters as exciting as a melodrama. Good shot: inmates of the violent ward waking to watch Dr. Monet's struggle with an unruly patient.

George White's 1935 Scandals (Fox). George White's formula for his Broadway shows--the genial alternation of song & dance numbers with dramatized bawdy stories--has been modified with each successive version of his film Scandals without any modification of White himself. He is producer, director, writer and acts the lead in this show which tells how one George White, a great producer starting on a vacation, sees White's Scandals as produced in a Southern hamlet by one Elmer White (Ned Sparks). James Dunn and Alice Faye, the boy & girl leads in the rustic show, are so good that George White takes them back to Broadway where the story progresses through the routine steps to backstage anecdote--the split-up of a successful team, its consequent misfortunes and eventual reunion. No one cares much when the inconsequential story is interrupted to permit Eleanor Powell to do some sensational tap-dancing, or to offer Cliff Edwards in a good production number in which he dreams of being Romeo to a beautiful Juliet and Mark Antony to a devastating Cleopatra only to find, on waking, that he is married to a very plain woman. The rest of the time one is safe in expecting chorines in Southern costume for a number called "It's An Old Southern Custom," and a property moon for Dunn and Faye to swing on while they chant "According to the Moonlight." The dialog, largely composed by White on the set, probably owes its shamefaced air to the fact that it does not contain a single double-entendre.

At 22, Eleanor Powell is generally considered the ablest female tap-dancer in the world. She started her professional career in 1929 after her father, a Springfield, Mass., gentleman farmer, lost money in Florida real estate. Her first engagement was a 20-week vaudeville tour at $100 a week, when she was 15. Since then she has appeared in Follow Through, Fine & Dandy, two of George White's Scandals, toured in Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt. At Manhattan's Casino de Paree, where the average engagement is two weeks, she stayed for 19.

In Scandals, experts estimate that Dancer Powell covers four miles in the course of her routine. She has brown hair, blue eyes, weighs 117 Ib. Her next picture: Broadway Melody of 1935 (MGM).

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