The New Pictures

Here's to Romance (Fox). This picture violates the accepted technique of cinemas about opera singers. Instead of discreetly presenting short pieces of music at climactic moments, it pours out superb tenor singing in a flood interrupted only at intervals, and not seriously, by patches of story; scatters brief festoons, long streamers and big solid chunks of song as prodigally as if it were the purpose of Producer Jesse Lasky and Singer Nino Martini to exhaust the world's supply of tenor music. True, Martini, after a few scales, goes into a popular piece Here's To Romance by Conn Conrad, but then he warms to this work. He sings Le Reve from Manon Lescaut, parts of Cavalier ia Rusticana, and Leoncavallo's Mattinata. He throws in two more popular pieces Midnight in Paris and I Carry You in My Pocket but soon comes up with Vesti la Giubba, and then rises to E lucevan le stelle in Tosca at the Metropolitan. Madam Ernestine Schumann-Heink inter polates Brahms's Lullaby, and Dancers Maria Gambarelli and Vincente Escudero do their specialties.

Genevieve Tobin and Reginald Denny are a rich couple who find patronage of the arts a convenient avenue to amorous adventure. Denny promotes Gambarelli. Tubin, to get even, sends Martini to study song in Paris. By the time she joins him here his tendency to regard their friend ship as platonic is fortified by his interest in a dance pupil, Anita Louise. He does not know that his debut at the Opera-Comique has only been made possible because Tobin bought out the house later finds this is so, and fails in his perform ance. He is back in the U. S. when Miss Louise starts him to fame again by bringing the director of the Metropolitan Opera Company to the 5-c- & 10-c- store where he is plugging songs. By the time he finds his way to Miss Louise's arms it appears certain that Martini has established himself as the screen's No. 1 tenor just as certainly as Grace Moore is its soprano and Lawrence Tibbett its baritone. What producers will do in the future for material to satisfy the public's new hunger for classic singing remains vague but pictures like Here's To Romance make it seem likely that before long the cinema, if only by exhausting the supply of arias, will create its own grand opera.

Nino Martini is 29, 5 ft. 8 in., weighs 152, has no hobbies, takes no exercise, eats heavily. He was born in Verona, Italy. His father was custodian of the alleged tomb of Romeo & Juliet. Martini sang in the choir of San Fermo Maggiore, practiced weekdays at the tomb. Giovanni Zenatello, oldtime tenor, heard him, taught him till La Scala at Milan arranged his debut in I Puritani which was revived for Martini. For the first time in 90 years the aria Credea si Miserere was sung in its original key of D flat. Usually it is given a half tone lower so that the tenor has only to reach high E. Martini took the F above high C. He had made a Paris date on tour in 1928 when Jesse Lasky, Paramount's vice president in charge of production, heard him, took him to the U. S. where Martini made some shorts for short pay and sang a song in Paramount on Parade. Lasky fired him. Martini went back to Italy, sang opera until the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company hired him as a leading tenor, became famed singing on a Columbia Broadcasting hour. Meanwhile Lasky had left Paramount. As an associated producer at Fox, his future seemed as dubious as Martini's in 1928. Martini had signed to make a picture for another company, canceled his contract when he heard Lasky wanted him. A hard-boiled Hollywood audience cheered themselves hoarse at the preview.

Maria Chapdelaine (France-Film). The habitants of Quebec, still pioneers after 300 years in the Canadian wilderness, still speaking a French that would be more easily understood by 16th Century than by contemporary Parisians, are immortalized both by their own qualities and by the writings of Author Louis Hemon. This picture, an adaptation of his most famed novel, reflects brilliantly the qualities which therein made, of a story so simple that it was at once an epic and an anecdote, a minor masterpiece.

Maria Chapdelaine, living with her famly on the edge of the forest, miles from the tiny village of Peribonka, falls in love with the trapper Franc,ois Paradis. On Christmas Eve, in a blizzard so terrific that ven Maria's mother does not dare go to midnight mass, Franc,ois starts from a far-away lumber camp for her house. He never gets there. On New Year's morning, Maria sees his body brought into the village on a dogsled. Dazed by this tragedy, she resumes the quiet, terrifying routine which is winter life in northern Quebec. Her mother dies. Her father reproaches himself for having made his wife spend her life so far from the village whose gayety she had loved. A boyhood friend who has left the land to live in the city comes back to ask Maria to marry him. The woodcutter. Eutrope Gagnon, does so also. The village priest preaches a stern sermon. Maria promises the woodcutter she will marry him in the spring and stays on in the wilderness.

That the delicacy, diffidence and power of Author Hemon's writing is in large part retained by this picture is doubtless due partly to the fact that Director Julien Duvivier made most of it on location. He took a cast of Paris actors to northern Quebec last year, used as many natives as possible for crowd scenes and bits. First shown in Paris last winter, Maria Chapdelaine promptly won the Grand Prix du Cinema Franc,ais. More noteworthy is the fact that it has been even more successful in Germany, where the critic of the Berliner Volks-Zeitimg was less enthusiastic than his colleagues when he wrote: "It is the greatest work of the French cinema and we should wish such films might be made in Germany."

As shown in the U. S., Maria Chapdelaine has English subtitles.

Red Salute (Reliance). The inability of Hollywood producers to deal with contemporary political and social problems is only less painfully exhibited by their customary reluctance to try it than by their timid stupidity when they do. In Red Salute, Producer Edward Small was patently under the impression that, by making the villain of the piece a campus radical, he was hurling an intellectual bombshell of some sort at the U. S. cinema public. The picture's release at the Rivoli Theatre in Manhattan last week actually caused a disturbance at which 18 adolescents were arrested for wagging idiotic handbills.

Drue Van Allen (Barbara Stanwyck), in love with the driveling campus radical (Hardie Albright), is sent to Mexico to get over it by her choleric Army officer father. There she meets a roistering young soldier (Robert Young) whom she tricks into helping her get back to Washington. What at times, during the return trip in a trailer owned by an irresponsible person with a soft baritone voice (Cliff Edwards), almost becomes a passable imitation of It Happened One Night, degenerates on their arrival into a tedious display of Red-baiting, climaxed when the soldier breaks up the meeting at which the radical is making a speech. Silliest shot: Robert Young pointing to a U. S. flag tattooed on his forearm.

King Solomon of Broadway (Universal). In this inoffensive little program picture, outfitted with almost continuous music and hand-me-down wisecracks, King Solomon (Edmund Lowe) operates a night club built chiefly with funds supplied by a dangerous convict. King loses his hotspot in a poker game, finds the dangerous convict unexpectedly out on parole. While attending to these difficulties, he rescues a Long Island heiress (Louise Henry) from kidnappers, loses his heart to an entertainer (Dorothy Page) and a small dog named Hamburger. The smart talk, unfortunately, is the sort that goes sour in any mouth but Mae West's. Says Miss Page to the convict, who is patting her leg: "That's the wooden one--be careful of the splinters."

King Solomon of Broadway, however, manages to be ingratiating when Band Leader Pinky Tomlin is blinking with fright or playing his guitar, when Miss Page is singing and strutting.

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