The New Pictures

The Case of the Curious Bride (Warner). Perry Mason (Warren William) belongs to the new school of cinema detectives. A lawyer by profession, an amateur chef by avocation, he investigates crime mainly for his own exhilaration. In The Case of the Curious Bride he is thrown into a state of high good humor when an old friend (Margaret Lindsay) pries him out of the kitchen to announce that her first husband, whom she thought dead, has reappeared, complicating her relations with her second, wastrel son of a millionaire. When he goes to call on the first husband and finds him murdered, Perry Mason's mood approaches hilarity. With his belligerent assistant Spudsy (Allen Jenkins) and his attractive secretary (Claire Dodd), he begins cracking jokes and upsetting the ethics of the legal profession. By the time his gaiety has started to subside, the murderer has been discovered, Perry Mason is about to embark for China.

The fashion for gumshoes who, when they encounter corpses, malefactors and degenerates, enjoy a manic period of which wisecracks are the symptoms, started with The Thin Man. The Case of the Curious Bride is a less adroit, less original picture but the speed of Michael Curtiz' direction manages to create somewhat the same mixture of tension and amusement. Warren William, fast becoming Hollywood's No.1 exponent of deductive reasoning, is aided enormously by Claire Dodd in her first cinema performance as a nice girl.

Claire Dodd has had a distrait career. Born in Iowa, she has lived in Arizona, Arkansas, Montana, California and New York. She wants to go to Europe but she cannot, since she has lost her birth certificate which she needs for her passport and does not know in what town she was born. In Los Angeles, she lives at El Royale Apartments facing the Wiltshire Golf Course. She does not play golf. Her major hobby is deep sea fishing. She has never caught a fish or even had a strike. She has few friends in the cinema industry. Most of the employes on the Warner lot, where her contract has another year to run, believe her husband is a millionaire connected with S. W. Straus & Co. ("44 Years Without a Loss to Any Investor"). W. Straus & Co. is in receivership. Claire Dodd's husband is actually Richard Straus, a Los Angeles realtor of moderate means. She likes large dogs and owns a Pomeranian. In her screen career, prior to The Case of the Curious Bride, she has always been cast as a siren. In private life, she teaches Sunday School once a week, dislikes siren roles. She is one of the best dressed, most personable actresses in Hollywood. She has no trouble dieting since she dislikes eating. She can drive her Packard but seldom does. Her next picture will be The Glass Key.

Traveling Saleslady (Warner) briskly relates the. adventures, commercial and romantic, of a young woman (Joan Blondell) who, to spite her father for not giving her a job in his tooth paste company, . goes on the road for his rival selling dentifrice with liquor flavors. Complicated principally by the necessity for outwitting her father's star salesman (William Gargan) while she falls in love with him, Angela Twitchell's career reaches its peak when, at a Chicago drug convention, she sees to it that her rival and fiance arrives late in a plane whose pilot she has hired to advertise cocktail tooth paste in skywriting.

Small comedies investigating minor aspects of the U. S. industrial scene have long been a Warner specialty. This one, less realistic, less ribald and less funny than Convention City, becomes satisfactory entertainment due to the efforts of comedians like Glenda Farrell.. Hugh Herbert and Ruth Donnelly whose presence on Warner's list of contract players is the real reason for pictures like Traveling Saleslady. Good shot: the dazed chemist (Hugh Herbert) responsible for the idea of liquor-flavored tooth paste, displaying the results of his formula for champagne powder-soap that fizzes.

West. Point of the Air (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is made with the ostentatiously acknowledged assistance of the U. S. Government for the supposed purpose of promoting patriotism and advertising the Army. It shows how Big Mike (Wallace Beery) helps Little Mike (Robert Young) get through the Army aviation school at Tavis Field, Tex. In the course of the picture, Little Mike's best friend loses his left leg in a crash, Big Mike has his buttons cut off in an unjust dishonorable discharge and Little Mike becomes involved with a feminine bad influence (Rosalind Russell) to the detriment of his romance with the daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan) of the Post Commander (Lewis Stone) who makes a speech in which he warns his students that few if any of them are likely to survive their training period. All this suggests that Army Aviation is a profession fit only for maniacs.

Except for cinemaddicts who are not yet bored by shots of airplanes flying in formation or of Wallace Beery snuffling on somebody's shoulder, West Point of the Air is not much more effective as enter- tainment than as propaganda. The dialog, by John Monk Saunders, is literate. Robert Young gives a civilized performance. Best shot: an anonymous stunt flyer, doubling for Aviator Beery in one sequence, making a belly-landing.

Ten Dollar Raise (Fox). This is the kind of picture that is made to go with the good picture on double bills. Hubert T. Wilkins (Edward Everett Horton) is a mousy little bookkeeper so prompt that the shopkeepers along his route to work set their clocks by him. And so unadventurous is he that he has worked untold years without daring to demand the $10 raise that would enable him to marry Emily (Karen Morley). The maxims of Marcus Aurelius, which are ready to his tongue, fail to console him for the pertidy of an office-appliance salesman who has given him three bad building lots as security for the loan of his life-savings.

Edward Everett Horton's chronic confusion is funny even when he overdoes it. Best sequence: Horton, drunk for the first time in his life, getting a crowded barroom to render the only song he knows, "Three Blind Mice."

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