The New Pictures

Craig's Wife (Columbia). Consideration for the Hays office on one hand and the feelings of its own patrons on the other combine to make the cinema's view of matrimony at most times a highly sympathetic one. Consequently the current cinema season may well be remembered for the way in which two first-class pictures have revealed two rich and respectable U. S. wives as altogether worthless characters. Dodsworth (TIME. Sept. 28) showed one who lost her husband by trying to remold him in her own pattern of a social climber. Craig's Wife, adapted from the George Kelly Pulitzer Prize play of 1926, shows another who loses her hus band through psychopathic selfishness.

To Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell), Walter Craig (John Boles), is simply a means to an end -- having a house of her own which, spotlessly neat, secure against all intrusions, symbolizes perfectly her own empty meanness. Craig submits peacefully when forbidden to smoke in doors, entertain his friends or go out for an evening of poker. He even smiles indulgently when Mrs. Craig runs his aunt out of the house, insults a friendly grand mother who lives next door and drives the servants into giving notice. It is a long worm which has no turning. Walter Craig's rebellion starts when an accident makes it unmistakably clear that his wife would rather see him accused of murder than let herself be touched by a scandal. When it is over. Harriet seems unlikely to recover from her pain at the discovery that those who live to themselves are left to themselves.

The stage version of Craig's Wife, produced by Rosalie Stewart, climaxed the career of Actress Chrystal Herne. The screen version exhibits to good advantage the talents of two other ladies. Her brilliantly vitriolic portrayal as Mrs. Craig is likely to be a turning point for Actress Rosalind Russell, heretofore noted for her smooth handling of light comedy roles. The work of Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood's only woman director, is equally distinguished for giving pace without apparent effort to a picture that might, with less expert treatment, have seemed pedestrian.

Dorothy Arzner is short, stocky, with a quiet executive manner, a boyish bob and an interest in medicine and sunsets. She graduated from Westlake School, a semi-fashionable Los Angeles seminary for girls, into a job on the switchboard for a wholesale coffee house. A friend got her a $3 raise and a place in the Paramount stenographic department. She became a script girl for Nazimova, did so well that she was pro moted to the cutting room -- a department then generally staffed exclusively by men.

She cut the famed Valentino bullfighting picture Blood and Sand. For Director James Cruze she cut The Covered Wagon, worked on other material for him while he helped promote her into a directorship of her own. She directed Ruth Chatterton in Sarah and Son, which gave Miss Arzner her reputation for handling emotional drama. Arzner successes since have always been with this sort of material, featuring women players like Katharine Hepburn (Christopher Strong), Anna Sten (Nona).

On the set Director Arzner whispers as if afraid of disturbing some invisible superior. Catching the habit from her actors, electricians, camera crew tiptoe, whisper. Absent are the jovial capers, bawdy stories, practical jokes traditional on male-directed sets. Away from the camera Miss Arzner works in an elaborate office built for her at Columbia, goes home to a hillside where she sleeps beside a window so that the sunrise will wake her. Although her father ran a restaurant, she shows small interest in food, takes rough age for lunch. She has never married, goes out little, is now making Mother Carey's Chickens for RKO.

The President's Mystery (Republic). One day last year Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked to Editor Fulton Oursler of Liberty that he had a good idea for a mystery story. Smart Editor Oursler pounced on the idea, got the President's permission to have it written up for Liberty in six installments by six promine Weiman, S. S. Van Dine, John Erskine. Last November the first installment appeared, accompanied by the President's picture on the cover, an article inside explaining the story's origin. A loud editorial coup, The President's Mystery Story was snapped up by Holly wood, which has made from it an adaptation which reeks of New Deal propaganda and good melodrama.

To resuscitate small industries laid low by Depression, the Government sponsors a "cooperative finance" bill. It is bitterly opposed by an evil capitalist, George Sartos (Sidney Blackmer), who fears that his big canneries will surfer. He sends his blase lawyer. Jim Blake (Henry Wilcoxon), to lobby against the bill, mean while dallies with Blake's wife (Evelyn Brent). Blake quashes the bill, goes fishing in a small town where he meets Charlotte Brown (Betty Furness), owner of a small cannery whose bankruptcy is also bankrupting the town. Suddenly seeing how wrong he has been and how tired he is of his wife, Blake goes home pondering.

Idly he picks up a copy of Liberty, reads the way suggested by The President's Mystery Story for a man to disappear and take his vast fortune with him. Blake's execution of this incredibly far-fetched escape is on the way to success when his wife is suddenly killed by Capitalist Sartos' chauffeur. The crime is laid to the vanished Blake. When the corpse he has planted behind as his own is found, he is called a suicide, seems free from pursuit.

At Charlotte's cannery, the reformed lobbyist starts an enlightened co-operative industry which soon brings publicity and Capitalist Sartos to the scene. Sartos recognizes Blake, has him arrested, fosters mob-violence to wreck the cannery and the whole co-operative venture, upon which by this time the eyes of the whole nation are focused. How Blake gets out of jail, encompasses the fall of his foes and the rise of a new economic era brings The President's Mystery to an exciting though hardly realistic end.

Thank You Jeeves (Twentieth Century-Fox) is the first appearance in cinema of the most famed fictional character created by Author Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. Herein, Jeeves (Arthur Treacher), fabulously efficient gentleman's gentleman to addle-headed Bertie Wooster (David Niven), teaches a Negro swing musician to play the March of the Hussars on the saxophone, extricates his master from a band of thieves posing as Scotland Yard men, adroitly furthers a romance between Bertie and a pleasantly mysterious young blonde (Virginia Field). Hampered by the fact that on the screen Jeeves is seen direct rather than through the mist of Bertie Wooster's dazed idolatry, Thank You Jeeves, though sure to disappoint Wodehouse addicts, is still a passably amusing farce. Sample dialog: When Bertie is trying to say that a young lady called at his flat and left without explaining why she had come: "She just popped in, popped around a bit and then popped out again.''

Piccadilly Jim (TIME, Aug. 31), was the first of Author Wodehouse's books to receive adequate screen adaptation. That the cinema has never properly utilized his work is a misfortune which may soon be corrected. Five years ago, after his first professional visit to Hollywood, Author Wodehouse expressed remorse for having "cheated" his employers (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) by accepting $104,000 for a year's work which consisted of "touching up" two stories. Last week, accompanied by Mrs. Wodehouse, two Pekinese, and a new typewriter to replace the 25-year-old one on which he had written 25 novels and innumerable other works, Author Wodehouse arrived in New York, en route to Hollywood for a second try with MGM.

The Longest Night (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the first production effort of shrewd, satchel-faced Sam Marx, erstwhile MGM story editor, super-supervised by Lucien Hubbard. Why such a product should call for twin entrepreneurs remains mysterious, since The Longest Night is designed rather for the Saturday morning diversion of schoolchildren than for the august judgment of the cognoscenti. It is a reasonably brisk embodiment of what neighborhood houses expect from a murder in a department store, including fun in the firearms department, wax dummies that come alive and slap policemen on the shoulder, pistol shots from a secret elevator, a kleptomaniac (Etienne Girardot), archery practice by a floorwalker, a couple of corpses and Ted Healy as a police sergeant, fumbling helplessly with a service revolver. At the root of it all are the activities of a ring of crooks who have been using the store as a cache for stolen goods. Best gag: the murderer's mob, coming to his rescue in police uniforms, set upon with pails and mops by a group of berserk scrubwomen whom they had tied in the basement.

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