The New Pictures

The Moon's our home (Paramount).

"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?" Henry Fonda asks Margaret Sullavan at one point in this picture and she, who from 1931 to 1933 was Mrs. Henry Fonda, answers, "Possibly. I'm the girl you mar ried once." However affecting the double-entendre of the exchange may be to people who know all about the private lives of Miss Sullavan and Mr. Fonda, the fact remains that up to the time at which this dialog is spoken, The Moon's Our Home is an agreeable effervescence, which then sags to a repetitious, overcomplicated ending.

Cherry Chester (Margaret Sullavan) meets and marries Anthony Amberton (Fonda) without knowing that he is a famed boy-explorer who has excited her professional jealousy. Amberton is equally ignorant that she is a cinemactress whom he dislikes because she has sponsored a musky perfume. A painful experience in Africa has so conditioned his reaction to musk that when, on their wedding night, his bride applies the sponsored product to her person, he forsakes her.

This scene, funny though it is, is not quite enough to make The Moon's Our Home diverting for the hour and 20 minutes it runs. Following the fashion, critics will doubtless credit Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell with the many knowing lines and pleasant minor touches, hold the lesser scribblers who worked on the picture responsible for such hackneyed characterizations as Henrietta Crosman as a termagant grandmother whose heart is secretly abrim with kindness and Charles Butterworth in his infinitely tiresome reproduction of an infinitely tired young man.

The Great Ziegfeld (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). According to the curious credo of the U. S. theatre, the late Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was an amalgamation of P. T. Barnum, Lucullus and St. Francis of Assisi. combining the advantageous features of all three, while the musical shows he produced were prodigies of good taste, imagination and romantic ingenuity. The Great Ziegfeld perpetuates this questionable legend with characteristic Hollywood insistence.

The picture starts off its hero (William Powell) as a barker at the Chicago World's Fair. He makes a fortune out of Sandow, the strong man, loses it at Monte Carlo, recoups in London by a contract with Anna Held (Luise Rainer) whom he steals from under the nose of his arch rival (Frank Morgan). He gives her a dozen orchids every day, makes her famed for her milk baths, eventually marries her. At this point, The Great Ziegfeld soars from the prose of fictionized biography into the poetry of revue. For 20 minutes, a huge revolving staircase exhibits showgirls, dancers and tableaux while a tenor sings A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody. For fabulous extravagance, this sequence makes the real Ziegfeld Follies look like a burlesque show.

The second half of the picture exhibits in euphemistic style the collapse of Producer Ziegfeld's romance with Anna Held, his meeting with Billie Burke (Myrna Loy), Christmas Day among the home-loving Ziegfelds, including small Patricia and her dolls. Enraged as his stars go off to Hollywood, Ziegfeld goes into a slump. He recoups again, puts four simultaneous hits on Broadway, mortgages their receipts to play the market. When Producer Ziegfeld died in 1932, he was heavily in debt.* In this particular, the picture is historically trustworthy. Its hero is shown expiring in elegant penury, an orchid in one hand, repeating to the Great Stage Director his favorite professional motto: "I must have more steps."

The Great Ziegfeld was in production two years. It lasts three hours, cost $2,000,000 and includes the most ornate sets of its kind ever built. It was written by William Anthony McGuire, author of five shows for Ziegfeld, and directed with monumental opulence by Robert Z. Leonard. In addition to three cinema stars, its cast includes three genuine Ziegfeld celebrities (Fanny Brice, Harriet Hoctor, Ray Bolger) and accurate counterfeits of two others: Buddy Doyle as Eddie Cantor and A. A. Trimble as the late Will Rogers. Trimble is a Cleveland map salesman who, often mistaken for Rogers, was last sum mer discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts. The picture will be shown in 20 U. S. cities as a "road show" attraction before being displayed at lower prices in ordinary cinemansions.

All this, adequately advertised in pre release ballyhoo which was grimly improved when the picture's Manhattan premiere last week coincided with the death of Marilyn Miller, onetime Ziegfeld star, comes under the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer routine. Its result is more surprising. At once biography and able extravaganza, The Great Ziegfeld approximates, more closely than any show he ever produced himself, the Ziegfeldian ideal. Pretentious, packed with hokum and as richly sentimental as an Irving Ber lin lyric, it is, as such, top-notch entertainment.

A Message to Garcia (Twentieth Century-Fox). Impressed with the resources of U. S. history as a mine of cinema material, Producer Darryl Zanuck has so far worked it for such nuggets as The Bowery, The Mighty Barmim and The Prisoner of Shark Island. A Message to Garcia is more ore from the same vein, showing that 1898 courier, Lieutenant Andrew Summers Rowan, performing the errand which the late Elbert Hubbard publicized in his famed essay. Dispatched by President McKinley to give Cuban General Calixto Garcia a verbal message to the effect that the U. S. was on his side in his revolt against Spain and to discover the strength of the rival armies, Rowan did so after a harrowing foot journey through the Cuban jungle.

In real life, Lieutenant Rowan is now a 79-year-old retired colonel who lives quietly in California with nothing much more than a medal he received in 1922 to remind him of his feat. He may be surprised, in this screen play by Gene Fowler and W. P. Lipscomb, to learn his mission was to deliver a mysterious sealed letter; that he was aided by a swashbuckling ex-sergeant of Marines (Wallace Beery) and the lovely daughter (Barbara Stanwyck) of a Cuban patriot; that his principal antagonist was an international spy of in determinate nationality (Alan Hale); and that he was rescued from the clutches of the latter by a charge of General Garcia's cavalry. Cinemaddicts less intimately acquainted with his exploit will accept these as legitimate embellishments of romanticized history. Good shot: Rowan (John Boles) and the sergeant wading through a pool full of alligators.

Small Town Girl (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Cinemactress Janet Gaynor occupies a unique niche in Hollywood. She is one of the half dozen pre-talkie stars who are still front rank box-office attractions. This phenomenal record has been made in the face of the fact that for ten years she has been playing, with superficial variations but no real exceptions, one role, that of Cinderella. The news that, loaned to MGM, she was to appear in a Ben Ames Williams story originally picked for Jean Harlow started hopes that Miss Gaynor's marathon might be about to end. Small Town Girl ends them.

Through the Massachusetts Village of Carvel, gay crowds pass every Saturday in autumn on their way to football games at Boston or New Haven. Kay Brannan watches them and sighs. Her family bores her. She yearns for more expensive things. One Saturday evening a handsome Boston socialite, young Dr. Bob Dakin* (Robert Taylor), sweeps up to the curb in his icecream roadster, takes her for a ride, gives her some champagne. Next morning, he emerges from an alcoholic haze to learn that he has married her.

For most girls, small-town or otherwise, young Dr. Dakin's boorish reaction to the news might well remove all glamour from the escapade and make a return to Carvel seem an irresistible alternative. Not so for Kay Brannan. With a stubborn sweetness that does credit to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's casting intuition, Kay Brannan goes about reforming her oafish Boston scion until, instead of divorcing her to marry the lecherous debutante (Binnie Barnes) who had been his fiancee, he is ready to sober up and settle down to work as a brain surgeon. Best shot: The Captain (Edgar Kennedy) of Dr. Dakin's yacht showing Kay Brannan how to steer.

Hollywood "Kidnapping"

Freddie Bartholomew, 11, George Arliss of child actors, gets an estimated $1,250 a week from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer because he impersonates immature characters like the heroes of David Copperfield, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Professional Soldier with incongruously mature dignity. Last week, Cinemactor Bartholomew was the central figure in as incongruously childish a legal mess as Hollywood, which specializes in such affairs, has produced in a long time.

Son of a retired British soldier named Cecil Llewelyn Bartholomew, small Freddi was packed off at 3 to be brought up by his grandparents and his father's sister, Myllicent Bartholomew. His "Aunt Cissie' promptly decided he was an actor, pu him on the London stage. In 1934, she took him to Hollywood to appear in David Copperfield. He was a sensational success.

Last autumn, "Aunt Cissie applied to legal custody of the child. His parent objected, charged that Freddie had been removed to the U. S. by "trickery an deceit." A California court heard th petition, called Freddie as a witness. He testified that his aunt had taken him to California with his parents' consent. The court made "Aunt Cissie" Cinemactor Bartholomew's guardian, gave his parents six months in which to contest the appointment. Last week, Mrs. Lillian Mae Bartholomew arrived in Manhattan on her way to Hollywood. Said she: "No one can love a child like his mother. . . 1 will fight all the way to Washington. . . . I'm sure the President's wife will understand me because she's a mother too. . . ."

In Hollywood, last week, Aunt Myllicent Bartholomew refused to reply to Mother Lillian Mae Bartholomew's charges that she had, in effect, kidnapped Cinemactor Freddie. Her lawyer stated that she knew nothing about the case except what she had read in the papers. MGM, scared to antagonize Mrs. Bartholomew in case she should gain custody of her valuable son, said nothing. Cinemactor Freddie himself was reported "on vacation."

In Manhattan, Mrs. Bartholomew, who had arrived third class on the S. S. Europa, told reporters that a family friend named Joseph W. Hobbs had arranged for her to stay at the Waldorf-Astoria. Next day, reporters tried unsuccessfully to find her at that expensive hotel. A New York lawyer, who said he had been retained by Mrs. Bartholomew's London attorneys, frantically announced that she had disappeared. He put private detectives on the trail of Mrs. Bartholomew and Mr. Hobbs.

In London, Cecil Llewelyn Bartholomew announced that Joseph W. Hobbs was an officer who had once been in his regiment. He was told that Mr. Levey had received a cablegram from Mrs. Bartholomew saying she was traveling "incognito." Said he: "None of the words of my wife's cablegram sound at all like her. . . . She has been kidnapped. . . ." She had not been kidnapped. Three days later she strode calmly into the British Consul's office in Los Angeles, branded as "publicity" the nationwide search for her.

* In White Plains, N. Y. last week, the executor of the Ziegfeld estate reduced its estimated deficit of $500,000 by $100 when the Municipal Theatre Association of St. Louis paid that amount for permission to produce Kid Boots for one week.

* Not to be confused with Chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin, co-discoverer of Dakin's Solution, famed Wartime antiseptic.

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