The New Pictures

The Three Musketeers (RKO).

The routine hazards of adapting a literary classic for the screen are increased in this case by the fact that an earlier adaptation in which Douglas Fairbanks performed in 1921 was a screen classic in its own right. That any subsequent version of the Dumas work would seem tame by comparison was almost inevitable. Consequently, it is to the credit of Author Dumas, Screenwriter Dudley Nichols, Director Rowland V. Lee and a cast of capable sword & cloak actors that this one is still a handsome, charming, and vivacious costume melodrama which, if something less than a cinema milestone, is still better than average entertainment.

Handed the thankless task of replacing Douglas Fairbanks in D'Artagnan's floppy boots, Actor Walter Abel, in his Hollywood debut, seems a trifle more nervous than a swashbuckler should be. This is due less to his own shortcomings than to the curiosities of the story. Investigating the means whereby the Queen of France (Rosamond Pinchot) retrieves a brooch injudiciously entrusted to an English admirer, it reveals D'Artagnan as an incompetent young cavalier whose headlong efforts to combat an international intrigue are successful only because the villainess treats him with uncalled for generosity and because Athos (Paul Lukas), Porthos (Moroni Olsen) and Aramis (Onslow Stevens ) interest themselves in drying him behind the ears. Good sequence: the three musketeers overtaking the coach in which Milady de Winter (Margot Grahame) has kidnapped D'Artagnan.

Way Down East (Fox), like The Three Musketeers (see above), is an effort to redistill for the sophisticated audiences of modern talking pictures the elixirs which their predecessors found so stimulating many years ago. The 1920 production of Lottie Blair Parker's classic grossed $2,000,000 and the scene in which Lillian Gish floundered toward a happy ending through the ice-cakes probably drew as many tears as anything else David Wark Griffith ever directed.

The current version, infinitely more sophisticated, is chiefly noteworthy as an example of directorial tact. Aware that much of the motivation in Way Down East is of the sort which contemporary cinemaddicts have been taught to consider comic, Henry King must frequently have been tempted to burlesque the story rather than risk having audiences discover their own laughs in its sentimental climaxes. Instead, with the aid of a sympathetic script, by Howard Estabrook and William Hurlbut. he gave it a straight-forward treatment, emphasized the backgrounds rather than the plot. The result is that Way Down East has a disarming charm which is almost a satisfactory substitute for the emotional impact of its famed original.

Censors of the cinema, swayed by the mood of the picture, are likely to overlook its message: Having an illegitimate child is a peccadillo for which bronchitis is an ample penalty. The details of this misstep by Anna Moore (Rochelle Hudson) with Lennox Sanderson (Edward Trevor) are not introduced until the quaint character of the New England villagers in general and of grim Squire Bartlett (Russell Simpson), kindly Mrs. Bartlett (Spring Byington) and their son David (Henry Fonda) in particular have been emphasized at length. Thus when the picture swings into action suddenly with the march of Gossip Martha Perkins (Margaret Hamilton) to a skating party to tell the Squire that his hired girl has had a past, the audience's appetite for action has been whetted so thoroughly that the anachronistic qualities of the scenes in which the Squire orders poor Anna into the blizzard and the one in which David rescues her from an ice-cake, leaving her seducer there to drown, are easily forgiven. Typical shot: Henry Fonda, currently the cinema's No. 1 exponent of bucolic charm, indicating infatuation with Rochelle Hudson by giving her a drink of water.

Le Dernier Millardaire (Rene Clair) is an inexpensive little satire about a millionaire who becomes Dictator of a minor principality called Casinario, goes mad from a blow on the head, institutes a series of outlandish reforms ranging from mass calisthenics to a ruling that bearded men must wear shorts. It was banned in Germany and Italy, as an insult to Fascism. Otherwise, its chief distinction is the proof which it affords that, at the time of its manufacture, Director Clair had almost run out of both ideas and money.

Best shot: a customer in a restaurant, when Casinario has been reduced to a system of barter, paying for his dinner with a chicken, getting a pullet and an egg for change, tipping the waiter with the egg.

Three Kids and a Queen (Universal). When the fabulously wealthy Mary Jane Baxter (May Robson), a crotchety old party who prefers animals to humans, is tossed out of her carriage in Central Park, Blackie (Frankie Darro), Doc (Billy Burrud) and Flash (William Benedict) put her unconscious body into their ancient car, take her home to the tenement street where they live with a kindly barber (Henry Armetta). The suspense consists of the fact that the police, failing to find her after the accident, decide she has been kidnapped. Mary Jane's regeneration in the tenement provides a theme which with more elaboration might have been some kind of social parable but which Screenwriters Samuel Ornitz and Barry Trivers have been satisfied to treat as sentimental whimsey. The denouement takes place when Mary Jane, restored to her estates but charged with mental incompetence by her relatives, maintains her liberty through the testimony of the boys, now her friends.

Best performance: William Burrud as a crippled newsboy who has been in so many hospitals he feels competent to treat the ills of other people. Son of a Los Angeles real estate man, Burrud has made no other pictures.

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