The New Pictures

Secret Agent (Gaumont-British) introduces to U. S. cinema audiences a hero who should please them highly: Operative Ashenden of the British Intelligence Service, whose activities have been recorded so successfully in fiction by Author Somerset Maugham. Herein Ashenden (John Gielgud) is seen at the start of his career, stationed in Switzerland, where Author Maugham himself functioned as a Wartime spy. Detailed, with the assistance of a gruesome character known as the "Hairless Mexican" (Peter Lorre), to track down a German agent en route to Arabia, Ashenden proceeds with more pluck than perspicacity. Nonetheless, having inadvertently permitted the Hairless Mexican to push a harmless tourist (Percy Marmont) over a cliff, Ashenden and a beautiful blonde English spy (Madeleine Carroll) finally discharge their mission with the help of bombing planes.

In contrast with oldtime fiction operatives like Sherlock Holmes, whose deductive gifts were superhuman, Ashenden belongs to the modern school of sleuths whose fallibility makes them plausible. In Secret Agent he scuffs about hotel corridors, deserted churches, glaciers, the backstairs of a chocolate factory, wearing an unhappy frown which is at times reminiscent of Charles Butterworth's. Spy Ashenden's behavior is, however, less of a hindrance than a help to the picture, is indicative of the enormity of the hostile forces with which he is trying to deal. Directed by England's pudgy master of melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock (Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much), Secret Agent is a first-rate sample of his knack of achieving speed by never hurrying, horror by concentrating on the prosaic. Its most irritating flaw is the old-fashioned tag shot of the faces of Gielgud and Carroll, at once clumsy and unnecessary.

Spy Ashenden is not the only new cinema personage produced by Secret Agent. The picture also affords U. S. audiences a glimpse of the young actor who is currently London's favorite Hamlet. An elegantly slim young man upon whose emaciated face a formidable nose between gimlet eyes suggests the front of a streamlined car, John Gielgud is the 32-year-old great-nephew of the late great Ellen Terry. A product of Westminster, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and several years of British stock, he made his reputation in successive appearances as Romeo, Hamlet and King Lear at London's Old Vic Theatre, branched out as a successful actor- manager in 1934. The most popular matinee idol England has seen in years, he experimented with the screen in Secret Agent because he admired Director Hitchcock, wanted to learn his methods at first hand. After each day's shooting at Gaumont's suburban studio, he scurried back to London to appear on the stage as Romeo. U. S. theatregoers will get a chance to inspect Actor Gielgud (pronounced Gillgood) in person next autumn when, under Producer Guthrie McClintic, he brings his Hamlet to the Manhattan stage.

Private Number (Twentieth Century-Fox) is that old stage play Common Clay, in which the beautiful young servant girl's love for the handsome collegiate son of her employers runs its course without benefit of clergy. The higher official moral standards of Hollywood bring Matrimony to Ellen (Loretta Young) and Dick (Robert Taylor) quite early in their attachment. He is home for the summer, and she has only lately taken service under Wroxton (Basil Rathbone), a tyrannical butler who collects a personal assessment, sometimes amatory, from the employes he engages for the Winfields. Failing to collect from Ellen, Wroxton tells the Winfields she is in difficulties. Follows the historic line: "So I'm not good enough to be your son's wife. I'm only good enough to have his babe!"

In spite of its mystifying title and occasional turgidity, Private Number is more than a cliche in modern dress. Its interest does not lie in the love affair but in its exposition of the complicated backstairs politics of a big household. Wroxton's perpetual quarrel with the cook, his sly methods of bullying the chauffeur, his espionage operations with the downstairs maid, his scavenging the household's pay envelopes and extending his influence into the private lives of his employers are a competent addition to current institutional screen drama.

Palm Springs (Walter Wanger) is an attempt to commercialize the publicity which fan magazines and travel agencies have lavished on a colony of luxury hotels perched on the rim of an extinct volcano in the desert 125 miles from Los Angeles. The narrative concerns the efforts of Joan Smyth (Frances Langford) to snare a rich husband (David Xiven) in order to repay her father (Sir Guy Standing) for his sacrifices in earning a living as a gambler to provide her with the luxuries of a fashionable school. She ends by marrying Slim (Smith Ballew), owner of a dude ranch.

To avoid annoyance by gapers and because the air of Palm Springs is often dusty, none of the desert scenes were shot at the resort but at an unfashionable hamlet called Palmdale, twelve miles away. Palm Springs' exteriors were built on the Paramount lot. Among the highly agreeable music interlarding this inoffensive picture is The Hills of Old Wyoming, which Wyoming's delegates to both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions chose last week as their official song.

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