The New Pictures

Let 'Em Have It (Reliance). When Tsar Will Hays discouraged gangster pictures in 1931, Hollywood, appalled, began trying to think up a substitute. After four years, it occurred to Warner Brothers to make a picture dramatizing not gangs but their enemy, the Law. Dazzled by the brilliance of this inspiration as expressed in G Men (TIME, May 13), other producers promptly set about copying it. Let 'Em Have It is the second of six films about Department of Justice agents now finished, in production or scheduled for next season.

Unless the other imitations of G Men are better than Let 'Em Have It, the current school of cops-&-robbers cinema is not likely to last so long as its predecessor. The picture relates how Richard Arlen, Harvey Stephens, Gordon Jones and Eric Linden, as agents, follow, harass and finally obliterate a gang of kidnappers and bank burglars, headed by Bruce Cabot. The mechanics of the plot are not improved by the fact that the original success of the gangsters is based solely upon the childish incompetence of the detectives nor is the climax heightened because it comes only when the desperadoes, affected by the strange disintegration characteristic of cinema criminals in inferior films, have shed clues in the form of clothing, refuse and old shoes so profusely that the scenes of their malefactions resemble junk heaps.

The heroine of Let 'Em Have It, as in G Men, is the sister of one agent, the sweetheart of another. In this role handsome Virginia Bruce gives the best performance in the picture. Good shot: Bruce Cabot inspecting his face after he has had it remodeled by a sardonic plastic surgeon.

Doubting Thomas (Fox) is a freely embroidered cinemadaptation of Playwright George Kelly's The Torch Bearers, whose central theme ridicules the small town amateur theatrical movement. Director David Butler makes the most of a pleasant job.

Aglow with anticipation of their forthcoming dramatic venture, a phalanx of clubwomen and their spouses, herded into rehearsals by their fundamentally large and pompous director, Mrs. Pampinelli (Alison Skipworth), fall over one another and the props, strut & stomp before mirrors, forget lines & cues and, in the show's premiere, make a thoroughgoing shambles of the little theatre art.

In this, his 19th talking cinema, Will Rogers drops his customary role of Public Friend No. 1 long enough to become a businesslike sausage manufacturer who from the start will have no truck with the theatricals. It is a different Will Rogers who passes comment after caustic comment, falls downstairs in an attempt to stop a rehearsal, manages to insult not only the rest of the cast but his wife, when that rattle-brained creature is erroneously flattered into believing she is an actress and accepts the lead in the show. Surprising shot: Billie Burke, as Rogers' middle-aged wife and the mother of his grown-up son, looking a decade younger than her 48 years.

Oil for the Lamps of China (Warner). When Hollywood producers last year were forbidden to make pictures as salacious as they wanted, they issued yelps that censorship would make the cinema more childish than it had been. As usual, their alarm was groundless. Forced to expend their inventiveness upon subjects other than sex, U. S. cinema producers in the last year have for the first time taken a sophisticated interest in social problems. In Black Fury, Warner Brothers presented a provocative and, for the cinema, daring portrait of the miseries of coal miners. Oil for the Lamps of China is another picture containing what in the past the cinema would have considered dangerously subversive propaganda. By no means either a Communistic tract or a libelous indictment of Standard Oil Co., it is nonetheless a thoroughly embittered picture of a U. S. corporation and its technique in foreign expansion. Adapted from Alice Tisdale Hobart's best-selling novel, its hero is a U. S. oil salesman in China, and its message, only mildly impaired by a self-contradictory sequence timidly tacked to the story's end, is one that might make an attendant in a highway service station think twice before he scrubs a client's windshield.

Stephen Chase (Pat O'Brien) arrives in China seriously possessed of the ideals inculcated by the company's training school. When he invents a cheap lamp which will make coolies buy more oil, he hands a drawing of it to his boss (Arthur Byron). When his fiancee jilts him, he marries the first presentable girl (Josephine Hutchinson) he meets in Shanghai because to return to his post single might cause him to look ridiculous and thus diminish his value to the company. Even when, as a reward for years of faithful service, his boss receives a humiliating demotion that will reduce his pension, Stephen Chase is discouraged but not disillusioned. The night his son is born, he leaves his wife to fight a fire in a reserve tank. Put in charge of a bigger office, he discharges his best friend for trifling inefficiency. Finally, he risks his life to save the company's money, when Communists capture the town.

The upshot of all this, when he gets back to Shanghai, is enough to give pause even to an idealist as confirmed as Stephen Chase. Credit for his lamp has been assigned to one of his superiors. The position which should have been his reward for meritorious service has gone to an incompetent sycophant. A highly improbable transoceanic telephone call, from the president of the company in New York to Stephen's superior in Shanghai, sets things right at the last minute but Director Mervyn LeRoy contrives to make this unnecessary bow to precedent as cynical as possible. Good shot: Stephen Chase and the girl he meets in Shanghai eating the dinner he has ordered for his fiancee.

The Flame Within (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). For attention from the current cinema, Department of Justice agents' only rivals on the distaff side are female psychiatrists. Like Dr. Everest (Claudette Colbert) in Private Worlds, Mary White (Ann Harding) in this picture is baffled when her own life presents the sort of symptoms she is accustomed to deal with in her patients. Having healed the suicide fits of an heiress (Maureen O'Sullivan) by treating her sweetheart (Louis Hayward) for advanced dipsomania, she finds her maternal instincts for the latter in a state of overstimulation. Her confrere (Herbert Marshall) convinces her that what she mistakes for Love is merely spiritual chicken pox. This is the climax.

Written, directed and produced by Edmund Goulding, The Flame Within displays advantageously that extraordinary confusion of sex with altruism which, for her admirers, constitutes Ann Harding's chief charm. In other respects it demonstrates the contention that subjects such as mental therapy are best treated in more adult fashion or else left alone.

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