The New Pictures

The Ghost Goes West (London Films). Rene Clair's first film in English, made at Alexander Korda's London studio from a screen play by Robert Sherwood, is a satiric fantasy notable for the qualities of grace, charm and imaginative wit that have long distinguished its director's work in French. Produced by a Hungarian, written by an American, directed by a Frenchman, and acted by an English-speaking cast, it has the homogeneity of style, the smooth polish often conspicuously lacking in its Hollywood counterparts. Its most serious fault is an occasional lethargy of pace, which is the only thing it has in common with any other film comedy so far exported out of England.

The ghost is Murdoch Glourie (Robert Donat), a frivolous young shade whose dour father orders him to haunt Glourie Castle in Scotland as penance for an act of characteristic levity committed during the 18th Century. Packed off to fight the English, young Glourie so far disgraces his station as to be killed while hiding behind a powder keg to avoid being thrashed by members of the rival clan of MacLaggan.

With this story incident as a prolog, the picture takes up the story of the Glourie clan on the contemporary scene, when the only member of it left is young Donald Glourie (Robert Donat). A shy, shiftless, personable young man, he lives alone in Glourie Castle waiting for someone who, by purchasing it, will free him from his creditors. When the purchasers--a U. S. chain-store proprietor (Eugene Pallette), his nervous wife and their pretty daughter (Jean Parker)--appear, Glourie Castle is moved piecemeal to Florida. The ghost goes with it. His penchant for crudely old-fashioned kissing games tends to complicate young Donald Glourie's more romantic experiments, but in other respects his voyage is an unqualified success. It is climaxed when, at Glourie Castle's Florida opening, the ghost discovers a craven member of the Clan MacLaggan, gets the revenge for which he has waited 200 years.

Rene Clair (Sous les Toits de Paris, Le Million, A Nous la Liberte) and the French film industry have been almost synonymous in most people's minds since 1930, when his first important film was an international sensation. In addition to being the only important director in France, he also wrote his own stories, chose his cast and took complete control of his productions. Long determined not to go to Hollywood, where, far from being No. 1 man in the industry, he doubted whether he would even be allowed to run his own Unit, Director Clair last autumn broke his own precedent to the extent of going to England to work for Producer Alexander Korda. U. S. Author Sherwood wrote the script of The Ghost Goes West, but in other respects it was a characteristic Clair production. Producer Korda, whose advice he might well have welcomed, scrupulously refrained from interference,, saw to it that Clair had a free hand.

With his wife Director Clair, a lean, elegant, sad-eyed man in his 30's, arrived in Manhattan for the first time last week, attended the enthusiastic premiere of The Ghost Goes West, planned a two-week stay before he returns to make two more pictures for London Films.

Riffraff (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is what Hollywood calls a box-office picture, meaning one whose merits, if any, will be revealed at the ticket slot rather than in the comments it will occasion. What will make it box-office is that it evokes, out of the half-forgotten time when pictures could be naughty, the original Jean Harlow.

Horrible though it will seem to the Legion of Decency, she is up to her old tricks, kissing with her mouth open, listening unabashed to lines like, "Take off your clothes and stay awhile." Spencer Tracy is the cocky tuna fisherman whom she sticks to even though Nick Appopolis, the fish-cannery owner, assaults her virtue with a matrimonial offer and a neckpiece made of well-bleached cat-fur. When her fisherman leaves her to go on the bum, she steals a roll of bills for him from Nick. Sentenced for this, she gets out of prison through a drainpipe, is reunited with her tuna fisherman, only to give herself up to the law when he promises to quit his cocky ways, work again.

Maudlinity is the keynote of Riffraff. Its situations come out of a can that was stale long before the first tuna was tinned. And it makes no effort to turn to account the genuine picturesqueness of the San Pedro, Calif, docks, where most of Riffraff was shot. Best scene: the finance company reclaiming the allurements of the Tracy-Harlow home.

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