The New Pictures

Anthony Adverse (Warner). When Warner Brothers bought screen rights to Hervey Allen's 1,224-page best-seller of 1933 for about $35,000 readers wondered how those cinemen would succeed in putting the whole story into a single picture. As revealed last week, the answer is extremely simple. Warner Brothers do not succeed in anything of the sort because they do not try. Although the picture is twice as long (2 hr. 19 min.), as an average Hollywood production, it carries Author Allen's celebrated adventurer (Fredric March) through only about two-thirds of his career, leaves its climax to the imagination or to a sequel.

Bastard son of an Irish cavalry officer and the young Scottish wife of a depraved Spanish diplomat (Claude Rains), Anthony spends his boyhood in a Leghorn convent. At 10 he is apprenticed to and given his last name by the Scottish merchant who by a happy chance, though Anthony never finds out, is his maternal grandfather. He marries the cook's daughter (Olivia de Havilland), leaves her to collect a debt in Cuba, goes to Africa to make a fortune in the slave trade, returns to Leghorn to find his Angela gone, his grandfather dead and the family housekeeper misbehaving with a grandee who Anthony does not know was his mother's husband. Having escaped the efforts of this malevolent pair to force his coach off the road into an Alpine pass, Anthony finds Angela getting along nicely in Paris as mistress to Napoleon. Then, accompanied by his small son, he sets off for the U. S. hoping to find the more abundant life.

Presentation of the longest picture ever made by Warner Brothers* in a year in which long pictures are fashionable deserved special ceremonies. Anthony Adverse received them. For its world premiere, Warner Brothers not only invited to Los Angeles' Carthay Circle theatre the biggest audience of screen celebrities ever assembled in one hall, but they also erected a grandstand outside to hold the audience of sightseers who went to see the audience of celebrities. Last week, a full-page advertisement in cinema trade papers expressed the thanks of Director Mervyn LeRoy to 133 actors, script clerks, producers, pressagents et al. for "helping me make Anthony Adverse." Thoughtfully included on the list was the name of Author Allen.

Whether the rubbernecks' grandstand, Director LeRoy's gratitude and even the qualities of the picture itself will cause the LeRoy version of Anthony Adverse to equal the success of the Allen version is exceedingly debatable. As hard-breathing, swashbuckling sword-&-cloak melodrama it is good but not superlative.

Charlie Chan at the Race Track (Twentieth Century-Fox) is the twelfth and one of the best assignments which that famed family man and sleuth, Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) has received from his home office, the Honolulu police headquarters. Outstanding question is whether Major Kent (George Irving) was accidentally kicked to death by his horse Avalanche, or just plain murdered. Developments include: 1) a crooked jockey who is also murdered; 2) gamblers who use an electric timing machine at the track to shoot a dart into the horse they wish to eliminate; 3) a rival owner whose horse, Gallant Lad, is switched with Avalanche. Chan unspins the web with his customary politeness, refusing to take advantage of his enemies, and talking his peculiar argot, minus all articles and most personal pronouns, and larded with proverbs like "Foolish rooster stick head in lawnmower, end up in stew."

The Road to Glory (Twentieth Century-Fox). Result of a Hollywood collaboration between Joel Sayre (Rackety Rax) and William Faulkner (Sanctuary), this war picture, which is not to be confused with Humphrey Cobb's war novel Paths of Glory, slyly differs in its point of view from most of its predecessors in the cinema's huge dossier on the subject. In and around a standard plot--rivalry between a lieutenant (Fredric March) and a captain (Warner Baxter) of French infantry for a hospital nurse (June Lang)-- it presents the spectacle of fighting on the Western Front with definitely sadistic relish.

The night Lieutenant Denet goes up to the front with Captain La Roche's company for the first time, a wounded man is pinned on the barbed wire just in front of the trench. The captain ends with a well-aimed revolver bullet his subordinate's temptation to try a foolhardy rescue. The tick of underground shovels tells the company the Germans are laying a mine. They listen for five days, evacuate the trench, when replacements arrive, just in time to look back at the explosion. The next time Captain La Roche goes into the trenches, his father (Lionel Barrymore), a doddering veteran of 1870, has joined his company as a private. On a wiring expedition, the oldster's theatrical bravery curdles into panic which makes him throw a fatal hand grenade at his own sergeant (Gregory Ratoff). The slaughter continues until La Roche and his father have been blown to bits, leaving Denet to explain to the nurse that he will presently be obliterated also.

Neither patriotic poppycock nor pacifistic preachment, The Road to Glory is sure to enjoy a vast popularity which may be partly attributable to the fact that it can be mistaken for either. Actually, it is propaganda for nothing but the shrewdness of Producer Darryl Zanuck in arranging the daringly incongruous combination on such a theme of two authors whose respective specialties are caustic humor and energetic morbidity, and in giving Director Howard Hawks the best material he has had since The Crowd Roars. In The Road to Glory, June Lang, publicized as the possessor of a "modernistic figure," makes her debut as a leading lady, and Fredric March's performance, unlike those in the two other major pictures (Anthony Adverse, Mary of Scotland) in which he is currently on view, is thoroughly first-rate. Good shot: a French sergeant reading La Vie Parisienne.

His Brother's Wife (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) does not present the kind of people sheltered audiences are used to seeing on the screen. Strong emotion makes both Chris (Robert Taylor) and Rita (Barbara Stanwyck) very caddish. She marries Tom, Chris's brother, to get even with Chris for leaving her to go on a scientific expedition in a prurient jungle. He retaliates by taking her to the jungle after he has gone home on furlough, just so he can tell her he despises her. This trick, though mean, does not impair her love. She inoculates herself with the virus of "spotted fever" to keep him from doing it, and is cured, after some agonizing symptoms, by a serum he has discovered.

Major embellishment of these proceedings is the co-starring of Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck, long co-starred romantically in fan magazines and chatter columns. Proximity in His Brother's Wife stimulates what is possibly the best performance of each to date, in spite of moments when John Meehan and Leon Gordon's screen play buckles under heavy alternating loads of whimsy and melodrama.

My American Wife (Paramount) is a pungent satire on the old theme of Europeanism v. Americanism, to which has been added a new twist. Many a plot has centred on the crusty U. S. capitalist who cleverly saves his daughter from an impoverished, scheming European nobleman. My American Wife presents the antipodal spectacle of a crusty U. S. capitalist saving an impoverished European nobleman from his scheming granddaughter.

Granddaughter is Mary Cantillon (Ann Sothern), whose head has been turned by the prattle of her socially ambitious mother (Billie Burke). When Mary returns from Europe to Smelter City, Ariz., with a titled husband, Count Ferdinand von und zu Reidenach (Francis Lederer), all the Cantillons but one are delighted. The one is Grandfather --Lafe (Frea Stone), a rugged individualist who founded Smelter City. "What in the Sam Hill does 'von und zu' mean?" demands the old man. Told it means "of and at," he snorts: "I'll be of and at my ranch as long as Mr. von und, zu is around."

When handsome "Ferdie" demonstrates that he hates being paraded at receptions and pigeonholed in a sinecure at the Cantillon Bank, wants only to go to real work, old Lafe changes his mind. With the guile at which old men are traditionally masters, Lafe succeeds in solving the domestic problem of a European who "wants to become an American" married to an American who "wants to become a European."

*Longest picture on record is The Great Ziegfeld (3 hr.)

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