The New Pictures

Early to Bed (Paramount). Although strictly for neighborhood consumption, this is the kind of trailer for that masterpiece of comedy that may some day be written about the science of psychoanalysis. Charles Ruggles as Chester Beatty, employe of a glass-eye manufacturer, worries about his subconscious. He walks in his sleep, a secret sorrow which has delayed for 20 years his marriage to Tessie Weeks (Mary Boland). To secure a gigantic glass-eye order from the owner of a doll factory (George Barbier), he takes his bride to a sanatorium where the doll maker is recovering from an odd disease for which the treatment consists of running around barefoot.

Beatty's tortured concern over his symptoms, his delight when a doctor tries to cure him by tying his toe to his wife's ("modern medicine has made marvelous strides"), his involvement in a robbery and a murder, which he believes himself to have committed while sleepwalking, are above the average for double-bill comedy. Typical shot: Tessie Beatty, who believed she was on her way to Niagara Falls ("where Nature's majestic waters play a constant symphony"), reacting to the discovery that she is in a nut house.

Fury (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) stabs into its subject, mob violence, with a variety of searchlights, sociological, humanistic, dramatic, while the subject itself turns under the beams until each phase of it has been successively and rather fearfully illuminated.

Joe Wilson is on his way to marry Katharine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) when he is picked up as a suspect in a kidnap case. He is driving the same make of car as the one the kidnapper is reported to be using and is roughly of the same description as the man sought. Knowing that a lynching party is forming, the sheriff telephones for military aid which the Governor, because of political cowardice, at first refuses. By the time the Governor changes his mind, there is nothing left of the jail but a smoking ruin in which, at the flaming window of a cell, Katharine Grant has a last glimpse of her fiance. But a newsreel unit arrives before the militia. Wilson, who has escaped, sees in a theatre the story of his own burning. He sees the faces of the lynchers and memorizes them. To his brothers (Frank Albertson, George Walcott) he confides his purpose. He will have every lyncher hanged for his own "death." The brothers help a zealous prosecutor press the charges against 22 indicted lynchers.

The big moment of a courtroom scene which sets an all-time high for legal realism on the screen arrives when the newsreel is projected with stopped action until most of those suspected are convicted. Now the brothers lose their nerve, shocked by the hate blazing in Joe. Even Katharine, who has just found he is alive, leaves him when he refuses her appeal to save the men he has condemned for his own murder. The judge is about to pronounce sentence when what is left of Joe's conscience drives him into court to undo his own reflection of the lynchers' fury. Reminiscent in its power of last year's famed Informer, though far more spectacular, a good deal less sincere, Fury is a triumph for Joseph Mankiewicz, young M-G-M producer, and Fritz Lang, monocled Austrian director (M), whose first U. S. effort it is.

Trouble for Two (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Browsing among the classics of 19th Century fiction has lately proved an. inexpensive and richly rewarded occupation for Hollywood story departments. Trouble for Two is MGM's discovery of Robert Louis Stevenson. An adaptation by Manuel Seff and Edward E. Paramore Jr. of The Suicide Club, it may not stamp Stevenson as the Damon Runyon of his period but, even with the addition of Robert Montgomery in curls and Rosalind Russell being more ladylike than usual, it is an adroit and pleasantly sinister blend of romance and melodrama.

When, given a month to bolster up his courage to marry a Princess he has not seen for ten years, he arrives in London for a last fling at youthful adventure, Prince Florizel of Karovia eagerly sniffs the scent of escapade when a feverish cub in a Soho restaurant tells him about the Suicide Club. The club, which the Prince first takes to be a hoax, then a cabal of lunatics, turns out to be part of a complex plot to assassinate him. The beautiful girl member turns out to be the Princess, whose disinclination for matrimony equals Florizel's. The efforts of the Prince and his aide-de-camp (Frank Morgan) to cope with a situation before they fully understand it have the agonizing quality, not of Stevenson's story, but of British cinemelodramas like The 39 Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Director J. Walter Ruben's handling of it shows that he has studied and almost mastered the technique perfected in his two models by London's master of cinematic horror, Alfred Hitchcock. Good shot,: president of the Suicide Club (Reginald Owen), with the horrid courtesy of a spider towards a fly, inviting the Prince to join.

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