The New Pictures

And So They Were Married (Columbia) begins with a conflict between a divorcee (Mary Astor) and a widower (Melvyn Douglas), who pretend to dislike each other when they find themselves temporarily snowbound in a winter resort, quickly draws into the conflict the woman's small daughter (Edith Fellows), the man's small son (Jackie Moran). Having estranged their elders, the children manage to unite them once more by getting them jailed as suspected kidnappers.

Part of the reason that And So They Were Married is better-than-average entertainment is that its 10-year-olds are endowed with adult minds and motives, a situation producing an unusual potency in the pranks the children commit, such as making a major catastrophe of a hotel Christmas tree and the party going on around it. The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (RKO). A decorative dunderhead (Jean Arthur) who writes detective stories has a habit of dragging her surgeon-husband (William Powell; into real-life murder mysteries. When they are divorced she tries to get him back by entangling him in still another mystery, involving the murders of a jockey, a trainer and a crooked gambler.

Competently acted, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford's humor derives chiefly from the sight of Jean Arthur smashing a plaster skull and a large vase over William Powell's head, from a morgue scene in which Actor Powell lifts the dead jockey's arm into view, asks his assistant to give him a hand. "You've already got one," says the assistant.

Speed (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an incredibly hackneyed story of a gruff mechanic with revolutionary ideas on carburetors who falls in love with a fellow-worker in an automobile factory. She turns out to be the boss's niece, masquerading under a false name to learn the business. Climax is a ridiculous world speed trial on Muroc Dry Lake in which love and the carburetor win out. Adequate acting by James Stewart and Wendy Barrie give Speed its only tinge of interest.

Sons o' Guns (Warner Bros.). People who are amused by the fact that Joe E. Brown's mouth resembles an omelet will not mind this version of a musicomedy in which the late Jack Donahue danced in 1929-30. Reluctantly embroiled in the War, Brown participates in a number of gags which culminate in his impersonating a British officer, getting involved in a battle, impersonating a German officer, bringing a German regiment back to the U. S. lines. Good pantomime: Brown, convinced that he is to be shot, rehearsing the way he will smoke a last cigaret with heroic nonchalance.

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