The New Pictures

Sworn Enemy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A first-rate screen play by Wells Root and a first-rate performance by Joseph Calleia make this otherwise ordinary Gangster v. Government film agreeably nerve-racking. Calleia is Joe Emerald, neurotic head of a protection racket who, because his own legs are so weak he cannot walk without two canes, has set his heart on becoming proprietor of a heavyweight champion prizefighter. The Root screen play shows how a G-man (Robert Young), who has inherited a promising young plug-ugly from a brother the racketeer has killed, uses this obsession to bait a dangerous but efficient trap. Good shot: Emerald snubbing the G-Man's accomplice (Florence Rice) for trying to excite him by pulling her dress up to her knees.

Stage Struck (Warner) depends for its punches on the kind of scene that makes critics unhappy and audiences hysterical. Such a scene is the one in which Dance Director George Randall (Dick Powell), hiding under the bed of Peggy Revere (Joan Blondell) when her onetime lover appears, has his protruding legs nipped by a Great Dane until he and the dog crawl out of the room. Less carefully tested but just as broad is the Yacht Club Boys' parody of a vaudeville tumbling act and their agreeable ditty, The Income Tax. There is some sketchy hoofing, a Harburg and Arlen ballad called In Your Own Quiet Way, and a tired little plot about the girl who gets the part.

In the ambling course of Stage Struck are traces of an interesting character, a dance director who hates girls as some captains hate the sea, a man with women smothering, mothering and berating him at work and at home until he runs away from it all. Unfortunately, in his flight he runs across Ruth Williams (Jeanne Madden) a stage-struck small towner. After that Stage Struck becomes another Warner Brothers apologia for backstage Cinderellas.

The principal surprise is Joan Blondell as an exotic lady who is backing shows to utilize publicity she got by shooting her husband. In gorgeous negligees she spends her time pursuing Randall, moping about her subconscious, and uttering lines like "Gentlemen, no X-rays. I'm not well enough for pictures."

Walking on Air (RKO) is a breezy comedy about the rich girl, Kit (Ann Sothern), who tries to force her father to let her marry a handsome bounder by pretending to be in love with a penniless college boy, Pete (Gene Raymond), whom she pays to masquerade as an objectionable French count. Sole variation on this time-honored theme is that Pete is also a crooner seeking a job in radio. This gives him opportunity to sing several pleasant new melodies (Cabin on the Hill-tot), Let's Make A Wish, My Heart Wants to Dance).

Just as he lands his job on a big-time program, Kit's family sees through his insults, she through his songs. Unhappily obstinate, she heads for Arizona and marriage to the bounder. How Pete, in the middle of his first broadcast before a swank crowd, succeeds in stopping her is too ridiculous to be funny: While his partner holds the radio station at bay by pretending to have a gun, Crooner Pete breaks off singing, babbles impassioned pleas to Kit over the air.

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