The New Pictures

The General Died at Dawn (Paramount). Leftist admirers of Playwright Clifford Odets may find it a little hard to get excited over the issues he raises in his first screenplay. Based on a story by Charles G. Booth, the contest it involves is between O'Hara (Gary Cooper), an idealistic U. S. soldier-of-fortune, operating on behalf of a Chinese province being pillaged by a war lord, and the war lord himself. Last week at the picture's premiere in Manhattan's Paramount Theatre, where the class struggle has heretofore been manifest only in arguments between patrons and ushers about smoking in the gallery, audiences were astounded to hear a well-organized claque applauding whenever Gary Cooper made his appearance. The applause subsided, however, when it became apparent that, despite the presence of a proletarian hero, the real theme was not Class War but True Love.

Entrusted with money to buy guns for the peasants' revolt, O'Hara lets himself be diverted from his purpose by a pretty girl (Madeleine Carroll) who persuades him to travel by train instead of plane. When this turns out to be part of a plot by War Lord Yang (Akim Tamiroff) to hold up the train, get the money for himself, a four-way struggle develops. The girl's father (Porter Hall), sent by Yang to deliver the money to his agent in Shanghai, plans instead to abscond with it. A Shanghai barfly sniffs out the plan, demands a cut. O'Hara, escaping from the general's junk, arrives in time to cut short these negotiations, but before he can find the money General Yang and his soldiers are on the scene. The elaborate pattern of violence which follows gives the girl a chance to redeem her original betrayal while Yang justifies the picture's title.

If plaintive radicals were inclined to inquire last week "Odets, where is thy sting?", sophisticated cinemaddicts were less surprised at the speed with which Hollywood had apparently caused Playwright Odets to modify his creed, than at that with which Playwright Odets had obviously acquired Hollywood's technique. Directed in somewhat over-ostentatious style by Lewis Milestone, The General Died at Dawn remains a first rate melodrama, vividly penned, performed and photographed. Good shot: a reporter (Novelist John O'Hara) getting credentials from General Yang by promising to run his story on the front page.

My Man Godfrey (Universal). "A scavenger hunt," sighs bored and beautiful Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard), "is just like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you find something you want and in a scavenger hunt you find things you don't want and the one who wins gets a prize, only there really isn't any prize, it's just the honor of winning, because all the money goes to charity if there's any money left over, but then there never is."

When Irene wins a scavenger hunt by successfully retrieving a "forgotten man" from the city dumps, she keeps him on as butler because Godfrey (William Powell) represents the outstanding achievement of her frivolous life. Godfrey, ready for renewed contact with a world in which his previous life came to disaster, wants to see if destitution has disciplined him for soft high life. Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch have peopled Irene's world with the most completely realistic set of rich crazy people seen on the screen for some time. Butler Godfrey shows the babbling Mrs. Bullock how to get rid of the "little men" that haunt her after parties. He disciplines her musician sweetheart (Mischa Auer), whose single ability is that he can imitate a gorilla. He solves the financial woes of Mr. Bullock, who has been looking forward to going to Sing Sing as an embezzler so that he can "get up early, and do my day's work and not' bother about bills."

Finally he succumbs to the infatuated, spoiled, neurotic and enchanting Irene who realizes that he loves her after he has cured one of her fits by sticking her, dressed, into a cold shower, on the ground that if he did not love her he could not have been so angry. Made out of material as old as show business and as tricky as cobwebs, My Man Godfrey emerges with that evasive quality that is not skillful playing, writing or direction, but something that mysteriously adds itself to these things, and makes a tip-top picture.

Follow Your Heart (Republic). Standard pattern of operatic cinema is the story of a pretty U. S. nobody with a glorious voice who rises from obscurity to a triumphant debut at the Metropolitan. Since Soprano Marion Nevada Talley actually had such a career, it might be expected that her first picture would follow the same trite formula. Follow Your Heart's chief asset is that it does not.

As Marian Forrester, Soprano Talley is a melodious homebody who spurns the career which her theatrical family tradition demands, plans to marry a stodgy neighbor in the small Kentucky town where her father (Nigel Bruce) has settled down to teach music. This intention, constantly delayed by the financial troubles of the Forrester family, is finally thwarted when Aunt Louise and Uncle Tony move in with their out-of-work opera troupe. The troupe's star and manager (Michael Bartlett) decides to present an opera written by Tony for the amusement of Kentucky Derby crowds. Success depends upon getting Soprano Marian to lend her voice. She refuses. How the handsome manager-star finally wins her support in the lavish spectacle solves both her amatory and the family's financial troubles.

Those who remember Soprano Talley fas a cornfed prima donna will scarcely recognize her in Follow Your Heart. On her Kansas wheat farm, whither she retired in a huff in 1929, she has trained down from 146 to 105 lb., is now slender, sharp-featured, vivacious. Definitely wooden as an actress, she displays a Mid-western twang when speaking, is at ease only when singing arias from Mignon and Les Huguenots, beside which the popular concoctions written for the film are apt to seem unusually hollow.

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