The New Pictures

Rose of the Rancho (Paramount). As a vehicle for the cinema debut of Contralto Gladys Swarthout, a revival of David Belasco's famed stage success recommended itself for obvious reasons. Born of U. S. parents and reared in Deep Water, Mo., Miss Swarthout has a Latin appearance well suited to a rigmarole about Spaniards in California and their efforts to hold their ancestral estates against early land-grabbers. Furthermore, the dual roles of Rosita Castro and Don Carlos, masked leader of the Spanish vigilantes, enable her to maintain a tradition which she inaugurated at the Metropolitan Opera as the page in Romeo and Juliet, of appearing in masculine costume. In other respects, Rose of the Rancho has more limited qualifications. Its story of how a U. S. Federal Agent (John Boles), dispatched to investigate the doings of the vigilantes, falls in love with Rosita and eventually helps defend her family hacienda against a gang led by Charles Bickford, belongs to the sorry tradition of pre-War operetta librettos. Spirited but silly, its best moments are those in which hook-nosed Willie Howard, as a Jewish gold prospector from the Deep South, and bespectacled Herb Williams, as a rapacious insurance salesman, engage in vaudeville patter in the Golden Nugget Saloon; and those in which Miss Swarth out, with or without the somewhat tremulous accompaniment of Mr. Boles, sings // I Should Lose You, Little Rose of the Rancho, The Vigilante Song, Where Is My Love. By her singing Contralto Swarthout makes it clear that, in the current operatic sweepstakes, she will not be out distanced by the Hollywood field. She is less buoyant than Columbia's blonde Grace Moore, but she has more chic. MGM's svelte Jeanette MacDonald may do better in her underwear, but Contralto Swarthout's throat muscles do not wiggle. Over RKO's little Lily Pons, she has the definite advantage of being able to talk English.

Gladys Swarthout made her debut at the age of 13 at a school recital. The audience included wealthy Kansas City friends who offered to finance her musical education. Thereafter she was a soloist in a Kansas City church, a student at the Bush Conservatory in Chicago where she also sang in Balaban & Katz theatres, a soloist with the Minneapolis Symphony, a minor member of the Chicago Civic Opera Company. After a summer in Europe and three seasons with the Ravinia Opera Company in the U. S., she joined the Metropolitan in 1929, made her debut as the blind mother in La Gioconda.

Pretty & popular young sopranos are rare enough, but pretty & popular young contraltos almost unheard of. Industrious Gladys Swarthout worked hard, made her name familiar to radio listeners in broadcasts for General Electric, General Motors, Atwater Kent, Palmolive Soap, Firestone Tires, Fleischmann's Yeast.

An abler musician than most opera singers, she has a mother who now dabbles in concert management in New York, a sister who teaches singing, a husband, Frank Chapman Jr., son of the American Museum of Natural History's famed ornithologist, who took up singing after he resigned from the editorial staff of Doubleday, Doran, met Gladys Swarthout in an opera house at Florence. She was born on Christmas day in 1904, likes to cook kidneys en brochette, plays golf, skis. Her East End Avenue apartment is distinguished by pearl-grey walls, a tea service presented to Mr. Chapman's great-great-grandfather, and the smell of lilacs which Gladys Swarthout likes so much that she had it mixed in the shellac used on her furniture.

Sylvia Scarlett (RKO) reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than as a woman. Just why, in the plot, she has to become a boy is never clear; it is something about getting over to England with her father, Henry Scarlett (Edmund Gwenn). who wants to start life anew as a lace-smuggler. But once Miss Hepburn has her trousers on, and she and her inept, ingenuous miscreant of a parent have met Gary Grant, a cockney adventurer with smuggled diamonds in his bootheels. Sylvia Scarlett becomes good entertainment.

Exuberantly the three make their way through England, recruiting from a London town-house Dennie Moore, a lady's maid with stage ambitions. They buy a van, tour the English coast towns, doing music-hall turns until they encounter Brian Aherne, an artist with whom Sylvia Scarlett falls in love. One day on the beach she slips out of her male attire, steals the dress of a girl in swimming, goes up to his house. What follows is one of those scenes which Miss Hepburn plays with her best intuition,, a scene in which a woman who has played a man so long that she has abdicated her sex tries to become a woman for the man she loves. Equally well done is a scene in which she rescues Aherne's sultry mistress (Princess Natalie Paley) from a suicide attempt in the surf.*

Sylvia Scarlett, taken from Compton Mackenzie's novel of 1918, is a story of a set of people whom the main stream of life has pushed a little to one side, sharpening and coloring them unforgettably in the process. It is made memorable by a role that almost steals the show from Miss Hepburn's androgyne: Cary Grant's superb depiction of the cockney.

First a Girl (Gaumont British) presents Jessie Matthews of the pretty legs, drooping mouth and banjo eyes, pretending to be a girl impersonating a man impersonating a girl. In performing this feat she is abetted by her real-life husband, Sonnie Hale. When the two first meet, she is a couturiere's stage-struck messenger girl, he a music hall female impersonator. He catches cold, loses his voice, induces her to take his place. She is so great a success that, for the purposes of the picture at least, to withdraw is inexpedient. Offstage she wears gentlemen's clothes, on-stage appears in vast glittering production numbers.

Meanwhile Sonnie Hale and Miss Matthews feel stirrings of love, not toward each other but respectively toward a princess and her fiance. Amid considerable fun for the audience, Miss Matthews attempts to repair this situation with due regard to decency, the law and her own feelings. Typical shot: the two men and Miss Matthews in male garb, drawing cards to determine who sleeps alone and who shares the double bed in the last available room in a French inn.

*With a camera crew in boats around her, Katharine Hepburn, though a strong swimmer, worked to exhaustion making these shots, was badly battered before they were finished (TIME, Nov. 4).

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