The New Pictures

These Three (Samuel Goldwyn). When Producer Samuel Goldwyn paid $40,000 for the screen rights to Lillian Hellman's famed play, The Children's Hour, the Hays organization had a mild attack of frenzy. The Children's Hour relates the case of two young schoolteachers whose lives are wrecked when one of their pupils accuses them of Lesbianism. This seemed to the guardians of the cinema industry's morals so appalling that they not only banned both the title of the play and its plot but refused to allow Producer Goldwyn even to announce that he had bought such a thing.

Last week Miss Hellman's adaptation of her own play made the perturbation of the Hays organization look as silly as it made Producer Goldwyn look shrewd. In the screen version the rumor charges one of the teachers with normal rather than abnormal misbehavior. This trivial change strengthens rather than weakens the story, makes it entirely fit for the consumption of all cinemaddicts with the most rudimentary knowledge of the facts of life. Brilliantly directed by William Wyler and acted by an admirable cast, These Three remains on the screen what The Children's Hour is on the stage--a calmly bloodcurdling investigation of what several honorable adults can suffer at the untender mercies of one dishonorable child.

Martha Dobie (Miriam Hopkins) and Karen Wright (Merle Oberon) open a school for girls in an old house Karen has inherited from her grandmother. Young Dr. Joseph Cardin (Joel McCrea) helps them and falls in love with Karen. One of her grandmother's acquaintances, Mrs. Tilford, befriends them by sending her little granddaughter, Mary (Bonita Granville), to their school and recommending it to her friends. Mary Tilford, shrewd, neurotic and remorseless, hates schools in general and this one in particular. One night she hears a strange noise in Martha's room, and from then on all the cards are in her hands. She whispers to her grandmother that Martha is up to tricks with Karen's fiance. Old Mrs. Tilford feels bound to tell the parents of other girls. The school goes to pieces, Karen and Martha lose a slander suit, and, in the sudden horror of the situation, Karen begins to wonder if the story might be true. Even when Martha finally proves the lie, it is too late to do much good.

These Three may presage a year in which child actresses will provide their own antidote to Shirley Temple and, barring the unforeseeable, should win Author Hellman next year's Academy prize for adaptation. In the part that 25-year-old Florence McGee plays on the stage, solemn nervous Bonita Granville, 13, makes herself as odious as any little girl who has yet appeared in cinema. Among the other children concerned, major acting honors in These Three go to plump little Marcia Mae Jones, as Rosalie, Mary Tilford's unwilling accomplice. Good shot: Mary blackmailing Rosalie into corroborating her baseless story by threatening to accuse her of stealing.

Brides Are Like That (Warner) is a homey little farce about a young man who shares with the hero of Petticoat Fever (see below) the virtue of apparent irresponsibility. Having prepared for matrimony by extensive sponging on his uncle, Bill McAllister (Ross Alexander) contrives to marry the girl of his choice (Anita Louise) by flattering her parents out of their well-founded doubts of his value as a son-in-law. The wedding over, he merges the apple-growing business of his uncle with the packing business of his father-in-law, wheedles them into giving him a half share of the combination.

William McGann's well-paced direction and the amiable acting of young Ross Alexander, whose mannerisms have not yet had time to crystallize as irritatingly as Robert Montgomery's, make Brides Are Like That a satisfactory if not particularly exciting example of inexpensive program comedy.

Petticoat Fever (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In a Labrador radio station, the eccentric young aristocrat (Robert Montgomery) who has lived there alone for two years finds his tedium relieved when a scatter-brained British aviator (Reginald Owen) and his fiancee (Myrna Loy) make a forced landing on the snow fields and appeal for aid. He entertains the couple with displays of whimsicality, dismisses his own fiancee when she turns up hoping for a reconciliation, persuades the aviator's lady to let her escort return to civilization alone.

Since Actor Montgomery started his career (with College Days--1929), his cuteness, his insouciance and his air of being incorrigibly charming have grown increasingly aggressive with the years. The climax of Petticoat Fever is reached in a scene which shows Actor Montgomery, dressed in white tie & tails, serving an underdone pemmican steak. For cinemaddicts to whom such a scene suggests noteworthy comic vistas, this otherwise innocuous little farce can be wholly recommended.

Everybody's Old Man (Twentieth Century-Fox). As a homespun soothsayer, a wit, a homely man, and, lately, a columnist, Irvin S. Cobb is a natural bet in the race being frantically conducted by all studios to find a successor to Will Rogers. While he lacks the 20-year vaudeville and stage experience which made the cinema easy for Rogers, his lifetime as an after-dinner speaker and monologist stands him in good stead.

As William Franklin in this picture, he is a canned-food magnate who is deeply shocked by the death of a rival food tycoon, even more shocked when he finds his beloved rival's insipid son Tommy (Johnny Downs) and dissipated daughter Cynthia (Rochelle Hudson) discrediting the family name and running their father's business into bankruptcy. Under a pseudonym, Franklin wins the confidence of Cynthia and Tommy, gets himself appointed their trustee. He rejuvenates the tottering cannery until it is competing successfully with his own. He takes the children's gin away, fitting Tommy for a happy life as a master canner and Cynthia for matrimony with his own nephew.

Everybody's Old Man is a typical Will Rogers vehicle which Cobb plays in the Rogers tradition, italicizing the laughs and slapping the sentiment on thick. As well-written family fare, it may establish a new screen personality.

Two years ago Hal Roach wired Irvin Cobb to come to Hollywood and do a couple of shorts. Cobb thought it meant write; Roach said it meant act. The shorts evoked no critical enthusiasm. Although Cobb wrote two scripts last year, besides a novel, a novelette, eight articles and a daily syndicated column, his new contract with Twentieth Century-Fox calls for acting, not writing. Cobb likes acting ("Hell on the feet but a complete mental rest"). He rented Greta Garbo's old house in Santa Monica, made a rumpus about finding a hot-water bottle in his bed. He knew it was hers because it was stamped "Made in Sweden." The Sage of Paducah, Ky., has made the following pronouncements on Hollywood:

"A producer is a man who labors under the delusion that the general public is as ignorant as he is."

"An actor is a person who, having failed to be himself, is trying unsuccessfully to be someone else."

"An extra is a star who has not yet been discovered, or one who has already been exposed."

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