The New Pictures

One Rainy Afternoon (Pickford-Lasky) is probably the most complete casual picture ever offered as the first production of a new company. It is abo a kiss in a theatre. Philippe Martin (Fracis Leder) gets seat No.99 instead No. 66 and Mile Pelerin (Ida Lupino)the kiss intended for Yvonne (Countes Liev de Maigret).

Mlle Pelerin makes a disturbance which spreads out of the theatre into the press is heightened with engaging exaggerations until Martin is a figure whom all female. France regards with a happy combination of revulsion and beguilement. He is known as "The Monster," and from the moment in court when he gives in rhapsodic language the reasons for the kiss, his fortune is made. The theatrical manager (Roland Young) who discharged him from a production in which he played the part a train dispatcher now arranges a musical comedy which duplicates the behavior of Philippe on the night of the kiss.

Jesse L. Lasky and Mary Pickford paid some $400,000 to cast this gossamer in celluloid as their first offering for United Artists release. They ornamented it with an assortment of expensive bit players with lavish sets, with mild satiric sorties on Law, Censorship, the Press, the Family.

One Rainy Afternoon succeeds by carefiul artistry in not being quotable. It not being quotable. is a musical comedy without words and without plot. Its virtue is its nonchalance which inexplicably becomes a striking feat of dramaturgy. Typical characters: Countess de Maigret as the wife whose idea of an escapade is to ride around the block in a taxicab with a lover who can be with her only in dark motion picture houses; Hugh Herbert as the theatrical prompter who, when off duty, prompts from force of habit the conversational cliches of those around him.

Many of the actual production details were handled by Mr. Lasky, since Mary Pickford is heavily occupied with her Parties at Pickfair" broadcasts, Christian Science and social life.

Last month Pickford-Lasky applied to Washington for permission. to offer two million dollars worth of stock in their new company. They have two stars under contract (Francis Lederer and Nino Martini) plan four more pictures this year.

Special Investigator (RKO) concerns a criminal lawyer (Richard Dix) who is good at persuading juries to acquit under-worldlings. When he is denounced by an outraged judge and his brother (Owen Davis Jr.) is killed, Dix changes his ways, joins the Department of Justice as a special investigator. The gangsters, having stolen a large amount of gold bullion, buy a Nevada ranch with an abandoned mine ship out the gold as newly-produced metal. Matters are made harder for Dix when he becomes enamored of the ringleader's sister (Margaret Callahan), but he is helped when the "gold miners" start shooting each other.

One surprise of Special Investigator is that comic relief is confined to a laudable minimum. Another is the appearance of Erik Rhodes, the elfin corespondent of The Gay Divorcee, as a sinister racketeer.

I Married a Doctor (Warner). When a modishly dressed young lady from Manhattan suggests to the citizens of the Midwest town to which she has just been brought by her new husband that they rebuild the place, including the drugstore in pseudo-Norman-French style, 1936 cinemaddicts will not necessarily feel that the idea is a spiritual and esthetic sunburst. Nor will they feel, when the town banker asks "Where is the money coming from? , that he is merely proving himself a worse dolt than the rest of the population by voicing for them an idea which nght-thinking people hold beneath consideration.

Changing what was once the greatest box-office title in the country, Main Street, or this second screen version of Sinclair Lewis' famed novel, was a simple task. Whether to bring the story up to date or treat it as a period piece must have been more difficult and Warner Brothers compromised by doing neither. The result, as acted by Josephine Hutchinson, Pat O'Brien and Ross Alexander, is consequently less to be recommended as entertainment than as an object lesson with the purport that time flies.

Absolute Quiet (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; consists of half a dozen well-worn melodramas tossed together, given a quick scramble, and dished up for the hungry half of double bills. Gerald Axton (Lionel Atwill), financier, sends his secretary's husband to Los Angeles so that he can transfer her to his ranch. At the ranch arrive Axton's castoff mistress, bound for Hollywood; her actor-lover; a Governor who has vetoed a bill Axton wanted passed--all in a plane in the process of cracking up. A pair of escaping criminals, also bivouacking at the ranch, refuse to let Axton light the flares on his private landing field. By the time the actor, driven mad by a facial disfigurement sustained in the plane crash, has killed the gunman and his moll, the secretary has decided that Axton is a despicable poltroon. Only good scene: the actor having hysterics.

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