The New Pictures

Show Boat (Universal). From a current Hollywood trend, cinemagoers may deduce that the length of a picture indicates just how good its producers consider it to be. Some recent films have been very long and, at the same time, very poor. But Show Boat, which takes nearly two hours to unroll, is well worth the care which Producer Carl Laemmle Jr. bestowed upon it as his final picture before leaving Universal. Handsomely directed by James Whale, magnificently photographed by Leon Shamroy, it brings to the screen what has become a U. S. institution: Edna Ferber's story of 1926 which was the basis of the Oscar Hammerstein II-Jerome Kern musicomedy of 1927 and an indifferent part-sound film in 1929. The latest cinema version, instead of following the Ferber book, magnifies the stage show, adds three new Kern songs to a score which still rests on many a U. S. piano rack.

Of the original cast, Charles Winninger is again Cap'n Andy of the Cotton Blossom. Heavy-eyed, heavy-mouthed Helen Morgan is the hapless Julie, dashing in the satin flounces of an 1885 showgirl, who is forced to leave Cap'n Andy's troupe when it turns out she is a mulatto illegally married to a white man. Paul Robeson appears as the honest, lazy handyman who does little but sing 01' Man River while the camera travels from his calm black face to toiling Negroes, and finally to the broad, rippling Mississippi -- in this case the Los Angeles River, widened to 100 ft. by three steam shovels.

Helen Westley, with the magnificent eyes and nose of an owl, is Cap'n Andy's shrewish wife Parthy. Their daughter Magnolia, whose story is the sad old one of the girl married to a wastrel and abandoned, is Irene Dunne who, in black face and kinky wig, sings Gallivantin' Aroun'. Allan Jones, despite a good voice, makes Magnolia's Gaylord Ravenal into a handsome nonentity. Familiar to many a Show Boater will be Hattie McDaniel, an amiable and enormous Negro who helps Robeson with a rollicking song called Ah Still Suits Me.

British-born Director Whale was completely successful in imparting U. S. period atmosphere to the whirling rivertown parade with which Show Boat opens, to the turn-of-the-century sequence with which it might well have ended. What follows is an outline for some other Irene Dunne picture.

The Case Against Mrs, Ames (Paramount) opens with a shot of a loudspeaker which emits a march tune and an announcement that its dramatized news program is that of "the weekly newsmagazine." There follows an inordinately frenzied resume of what would appear to be just another murder. All this constitutes a dubious asset to a crime-&-courtroom picture which is otherwise well-plotted, well-paced entertainment.

Almost everyone but the jury which frees her seems to believe that Mrs. Ames (Madeleine Carroll) shot and killed her rich husband. An assistant district attorney (George Brent) is so convinced of it that he denounces the jury, gets jailed for contempt of court. Mrs. Ames's dowager mother-in-law (Beulah Bondi) makes the murder a pretext for taking possession of Mrs. Ames's small son. Acting from thoroughly scrambled motives, the assistant district attorney performs some sleuthing while the not particularly bright young widow makes a mess of acting as her own counsel in a court battle for her son.

Crime Club addicts, who have been successful in compelling mystery writers to observe an elementary code of ethics, will catch The Case Against Mrs. Ames in a flagrant breach of the rule against false clues. This occurs when the assistant district attorney begins his sleuthing by having the crime re-enacted, with an owlish butler (Arthur Treacher) as the victim.

Champagne Charlie (Twentieth Century-Fox) was perhaps tossed off for such neighborhood cinemagoers as call the beverage Champagne wine and believe that the fashionable thing to do at Monte Carlo is to play roulette. Badly directed and appallingly acted, it is the scrambled saga, told in flash backs, of a gambler called Champagne Charlie (Paul Cavanagh), beneath whose faultless stiff shirt beats an honest heart. At the behest of two shifty colleagues, he woos an heiress (Helen Wood) whose dowry he plans to share with them. When Champagne Charlie learns that his fiancee is the daughter of his old sweetheart, he has himself killed in an automobile accident. The insufficient excuse for relating all this is that it is supposed to justify the murder, by a ship's barman, of one of the confederates for having attempted to blackmail the heiress. Typical shot: The heiress looking dreamy as she tells her guardians that her fiance "knows all the best foods, can identify wine vintages, and is a wizard at roulette."

Let's Sing Again (RKO) is tailor-made entertainment to launch a new child actor named Bobby Breen. This 8-year-old lacks the suavity of Freddie Bartholomew, the lip-curling meanness of Jackie Searl, but he may find his own public as a miniature Al Jolson. Let's Sing Again presents Bobby Breen as an inmate of an orphan asylum who stows away with a traveling show, wins the sympathy of an amiable, broken-down Italian tenor (Henry Armetta). When an acrobat seeks to adopt the child to capitalize on his singing talents, Armetta and Bobby flee to Manhattan. There their path crosses that of Bobby's long-lost baritone father (George Houston). Father and son are reunited when they sing a melting lullaby, remembered by each from their joint past.

Bobby Breen was born in Montreal to non-professional parents. His sister Sally, now a musicomedy performer of 19, discovered what she calls his "lyric tenor," gave him music lessons. Bobby made his debut at 3 in a Toronto night club where he sang once a week for two years. After appearances in Chicago and Manhattan, the brown-eyed, curly-headed youngster was taken up last year by Eddie Cantor, who proceeded to publicize him as his "adopted radio son."

Bobby eBreen is by no means as bad as the accolade of his radio following would indicate. In an even voice which sounds rather like a hoarse canary, he stays on pitch, can negotiate coloratura passages with ease. His favorite selection, the name of which he cannot spell, is La donna e mobile from Rigoletto. He plays the violin and piano, professes to like base ball, swimming, horseback. On a Manhattan sickbed this 8-year-old rattled along to an interviewer with the practiced ease of an old Broadwayite: "I opened my mouth at Flower Hospital. I'm singing for the kids, you see? And what happens? I get bronchitis. . . . My favorite ambition when I was a little boy was to go to a military academy. Then I got the West Point idea. Now I don't know. But if I'm going to be in pictures, I want to wear a uniform."

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