The New Pictures

Bugle Ann (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Night after night when dampness has flushed the black-dark woods and scents are strong and clear, hounds run in Missouri. Practicing one of the oldest U. S. sports, their masters sit around bonfires in convenient clearings, following the hunt of their bugle-voiced foxhounds by ear alone. Of this breed was Bugle Ann, a real bugler, rare even among its own kind, about which MacKinlay Kantor wrote his short best-selling novel, played in the picture by a prize bitch from the pack of Sheriff Tom Bash of Kansas City, Mo. Bitch, to be sure, was a word Spring Davis (Lionel Barrymore) would not allow used for his lady-dog. He believed in general that a dog was as good a friend as a man, except that it had none of a man's faults. When an interloper (Dudley Digges) circled his sheep pasture with woven-wire fence, hog-tight, bull-strong, and horse-high, Spring held him for an enemy although his own son Benjy (Eric Linden) loved the interloper's daughter, Camden (Maureen O'Sullivan). One night of good hunting, a dog's pain-yip in the dark and a trail of Bugle Ann's footsteps stopping at the interloper's gate made Spring feel that his neighbor had killed his lady. Therefore he killed the interloper with a bullet from his lever-action Winchester and was unmoved when they sent him to state's prison for 20 years. When he got out in four, he found that Camden had the explanation for his pardon, and for the ghost of Bugle Ann which ran the woods the night of his return. So nearly a scenario was Kantor's novel that Samuel Hoffenstein and Harvey Gates could have written most of their adaptation with a pair of shears and a paste-pot. Yet no company but M-G-M bid for the book. It is as far from conventional screen material as a good fox-night from the sick air of a soundstage. Director Richard Thorpe has kept a newsreel vitality in his telling of the tale, much of which was made in Missouri, almost the whole of it out-of-doors. It is Lionel Barrymore's best part in years and a valid and vital contribution to current cinema. Some shots: Possums drowsing on a bough, hounds running down a gulley, seen from above; a fox in his den, snapping at the hounds through the narrow opening; the courthouse at Jefferson City, Mo.

The Prisoner of Shark Island (Twentieth Century-Fox). Suggested to Producer Darryl Zanuck by a story in TIME (Feb. 4, 1935), this picture investigates the sad case of Dr. Samuel Alexander Mudd. On April 15, 1865, two horsemen galloped up to Dr. Mudd's door in Charles County, Md. and asked for help. One had a broken leg; Dr. Mudd set it. Later that day the horsemen galloped away. The injured one was John Wilkes Booth. For his services, Dr. Mudd found himself suspected of being party to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was court martialed, with seven other suspects, sentenced to life imprisonment in Fort Jefferson, on the dry Tortugas, off the southern tip of Florida. He tried to escape, failed, was put in a solitary dungeon. When yellow fever killed the prison's doctor and scores of its 1,000 convicts, Dr. Mudd volunteered his services, worked heroically to stem the epidemic. In the spring of 1869 he was pardoned by President Andrew Jackson.

In The Prisoner of Shark Island, Dr. Mudd is Warner Baxter, rolling his eyes with suitable agony at the world's injustice. Remembering the success of Les Miserables, in which Charles Laughton gave a memorable interpretation of a tireless detective, Producer Zanuck inserted a similar character to add to Dr. Mudd's torments at Fort Jefferson: a lean & mean chief warden (John Carradine). A sharp-tongued, suspicious prison doctor was well played by 0. P. Heggie, who died two weeks after his role was finished. The picture is a splendid example of biographical melodrama which should appall its audiences, enrich its producers and remind Hollywood that U. S. history, no less than that of France, Mexico and Britain, contains rich veins of screen material which deserve to be mined by able writers. The Milky Way (Paramount). No. 2 comedian of silent pictures, almost as rich and famed as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd reacted differently when talkies arrived. While Chaplin, with the egoism permissible to genius, defied the new medium, Lloyd conscientiously set out to adapt himself to it. His method was cautious: while retaining the outlines of the comic character with which his admirers had been pleased in silent pictures, he chose stories which depended less exclusively on the efforts of the star, placed part of the burden of getting laughs on the other members of the cast. The Milky Way, his fifth talking picture, is to date the most successful demonstration of this method. It is an entirely unsophisticated and uproariously funny farce built around the reliable situation of a milksop forced by fate to be a prizefighter. However, unlike Chaplin's Modern Times (TIME, Feb. 17) which would have been nonexistent without Chaplin, The Milky Way might have been a shade funnier if Producer Lloyd had cast someone other than himself in the leading role. Burleigh Sullivan (Lloyd), a craven milkwagon driver who, in order to preserve his feeble physique, has perfected the art of ducking punches, tries to rescue his sister (Helen Mack) from two drunks. When he ducks a punch from one of the drunks, it knocks out the other, who turns out to be Middleweight Champion "Speed"' MacFarland. Acclaimed for the knockout, Burleigh is urged by MacFarland's manager (Adolphe Menjou) to try prizefighting professionally. He accepts, to raise money to help cure Agnes, his ailing milkwagon horse. The story that follows is what hundreds of similar farces have taught cinemaddicts to expect, but the gags are new and Director Leo McCarey keeps them sputtering across the screen at firecracker speed. Funniest scenes: Lloyd learning to box from MacFarland's tough sparring partner (Lionel Stander); teaching the dowager patron of a benefit bout how to duck a punch; knocking out Champion MacFarland, whose seconds have accidentally given him a sleeping potion just before the fight. It Had to Happen (Twentieth Century-Fox) is about a group of glossy New Yorkers who exist only in the imaginations of writers like Rupert Hughes, from whose story it was adapted. There is the behind-the-scenes politician (George Raft) whose heart is as big as his racing stable, the patrician young lady (Rosalind Russell) whom he loves, and her unpleasant husband (Alan Dinehart). Rosalind Russell, till a rookie Myrna Loy, and Raft, whose arrogance may be taken as an expression of his delight at not having to do a rumba sequence, act it pleasantly enough. Best shot: Rosalind Russell informing George Raft that she has required six bottles of champagne to fortify herself for the ordeal of his lovemaking.

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