The New Pictures

Shanghai (Paramount) is a soberly sentimental treatise upon the inconveniences of racial intermarriage in which Dmitri Koslov (Charles Boyer), son of a Manchu Princess and a Russian nobleman, makes diffident love to a visiting U. S. heiress (Loretta Young) among the bars and drawing rooms of Shanghai's European colony. Assiduous cinemaddicts, who have seen it emphasized in 75% of all previous geographic problem plays, should experience small difficulty in assimilating the moral of the picture, implicit in the scene in which Dmitri and his heiress decide to part forever: East is East and West is West. This scrap of traveler's lore is hardly made to seem more stimulating or original by the events leading up to the renunciation scene, in which Dmitri effects a six-months' rise from rickshaw-boy to international financier while his inamorata is gracefully rejecting the countersuit of a flaccid young American (Fred Keating).

That Shanghai is both less informative and less exciting than the article in Fortune which suggested it to Producer Walter Wanger is not the fault of Actor Boyer. He functions with his usual skill, contrives to make Dmitri that most familiar of cinema anomalies, a plausible individual surrounded by implausible events. Good shot : the board room of a broker's office with customers in evening dress waiting for the market to open in New York.

Accent on Youth (Paramount). Play wright Samson Raphaelson balanced this fragile triangle on Broadway for many weeks in spite of its perilous distribution of sympathy in favor of middle-age against youth. As a cinema it enlists the aid of Sylvia Sidney and Herbert Marshall, whose air of romantic maturity is accentuated by powdered temples, spectacles, and a polite, nostalgic way of asking for a kiss. Miss Sidney first becomes his leading lady (he is a playwright ) when getting fired as his secretary prods her into a love avowal, and ends as his fiancee after an interlude with Philip Reed, who symbolizes Princetonian youth. Accent on youth suffers less than most light pieces in translation to the screen, for, although its people sit around and talk a lot, they at least talk with wit. One funny situation occurs when Reed, not recognizing Marshall as his rival in love, begs him, as a playmaker, to devise a dramatic way for him to express his passion for Miss Sidney, and then proceeds to win her by completely disregarding the scene which Marshall has concocted for him. Another comes with Miss Sidney's discovery that a young husband who gets her up at 7 o'clock and makes her spend her waking hours at violent physical pastimes is less comfortable than an older lover whom the years have made sedate.

Civilized entertainment. Accent on Youth should please practically every class of U. S. cinema-seers except students or graduates of Princeton University. Good shot: Marshall's butler (Ernest Cossart) perfectly executing three difficult billiard shots which are photographed with out any faking.

Broadway Gondolier (Warner) is distinguished from most Warner Brothers musical films starring Dick Powell in that it contains none of Busby Berkeley's exercises in geometry for full chorus and perambulating harpsichords. Whether this daring advance in the process of civilizing musicomedy on the screen will by itself be sufficient to recommend the film to large audiences remains to be seen. That its producers hope so is apparent, for Broadway Gondolier contains no substitute more elaborate than the debatably engrossing spectacle of Dick Powell grunting like a pig. He is Richard Purcell, a Manhattan taxi-driver trying to land a job in radio by filling in on a children's hour. With the assistance of an executive's secretary (Joan Blondell) and a trip to Venice, from which he returns as Ricardo Purcelli, he succeeds, by becoming the star of the Flagenheim Cheese Hour. There follows the sequence in which he engages in tantrums because his conscience tells him he is deceiving the public. Best shot: an anonymous actor's rigid smile while singing a theme sons:--"It aids your digestion, so take our suggestion, eat Flagenheim Cheese."

Don't Bet on Blondes (Warner) is a busy little urban farce showing what happens when a Broadway bookmaker tries to turn his establishment into a minor copy of Lloyd's of London. "Odds" Owens (Warren William) insures a penurious Kentucky colonel (Guy Kibbee) for $50,000 against the possibility that his actress daughter (Claire Dodd) will cease to be the source of his income by marrying. Trying to protect his investment, Owens ends by falling in love and marrying the girl himself.

Obviously made almost as quickly as a two-dollar bet, the picture is satisfactory hot-weather entertainment largely because of the presence of a more than usually picaresque group of minor characters. Good shot: Odds Owens' left-hand man (Vince Barnett) insuring the tonsils of an Idaho husband-calling champion.

A busy and successful comedian, who free-lances for features, has a contract for eight educational shorts a year, Vince Barnett is less famed in Hollywood as an actor than as a "ribber." Because the ''rib," a peculiar form of practical joke, is Hollywood's favorite style of off-stage humor, it has there reached its greatest perfection, and Barnett is the No. 1 ribber of the world. At a formal party given by Mary Pickford, he ribbed the hostess by pretending not to like her guests. Mary Pickford took him aside, gave him a Christian Science talk on liking people. When he failed to be impressed, she asked him to stroll outside and continue the talk. Barnett put her in a rage by his climactic remark, uttered in the presence of Douglas Fairbanks: "I never leave a party with a married woman."

Perfect technique in ribbing includes ending the rib just before it leads to violence. Ribber Barnett's most notable failure in this respect occurred at a banquet for Roald Amundsen where he assured the explorer that he was a fake & crook who belonged in jail with Dr. Cook. Explorer Amundsen rose, apologized to the other guests for what he was about to do, punched Ribber Barnett on the jaw. Ribber Barnett has a string of aliases of which his favorites are Professor Alex Timko, George Karoki, Count Von Hogarstrom, Dr. Lefka. Originally a professional ribber, who received $500 for a night's work, he now ribs for fun. Most of his victims become his friends. He inherited his vocation from his father, Luke Barnett, a onetime stage comedian and professional ribber of Pittsburgh. Month ago Ribber Barnett was arrested in Hollywood for drunken driving, claimed he was punched by a policeman.

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