The New Pictures

Cain and Mabel (Warner Bros.). "Her face is new," comments a character early in this picture in reference to Marion Davies. Actually, Cinemactress Davies' face, first seen on the screen in 1918, is getting quite old. It will never be as old, however, as Cain and Mabel's plot, which combines two of the cinema's most familiar story formulas: 1) Hate Can Turn to Love; 2) The Way to a Man's Heart Is Through His Stomach.

Hate arises between Cain (Clark Gable) and Mabel (Marion Davies) when he, trying to sleep before fighting for the world's heavyweight title, is kept awake all night by her tap dancing in the room above. He loses the fight, earns another crack at the title, wins it. When neither he nor Mabel proves a box-office draw, a press agent gives them glamor by a fake romance. This evokes wearisome bickering, which suddenly ends when hungry Cain surprises Mabel cooking a pork chop. They take to meeting surreptitiously in the public library, kissing behind a book on ichthyology. This state of affairs is ruptured by the machinations of the press agent. Before the fadeout Cain goes berserk in the ring, Mabel goes berserk on the stage.

The Magnificent Brute (Universal) investigates the lighter side of life in the Pennsylvania steel towns. At his boardinghouse, Big Steve Andrews (Victor McLaglen) is idolized by Mrs. Finney, its proprietress, and her 10-year-old son. In the mill, he runs its most efficient furnace crew, to the chagrin of bragging Bill Morgan (William Hall). Their rivalry reaches its climax after Big Steve has stolen Bill's girl (Binnie Barnes), when Big Steve climbs into the ring with a professional wrestler imported by Bill. The wrestler throws Big Steve who, it appears, has lost $400 contributed by fellow workers to a benefit fund, through betting on himself. When things look their blackest, Big Steve learns that his faithless sweetheart really gave the money to her old friend Bill, who bet it on the professional. Big Steve fishes the bearer of the news, Mrs. Finney's little boy, out of a slag box just before a mass of red-hot slag pours into it. Afterward he smashes Bill Morgan's jaw, takes the money back, confers with Mrs. Finney about matrimony.

In dealing with the life of a steelworker, any medium except the cinema would inevitably have found Labor v. Capital a central problem. For Universal, the sole problem herein was how to substitute overalls for the soldiers' uniforms McLaglen has worn in his recent pictures. Adapted from a Liberty story, directed by John G. Blystone, The Magnificent Brute effects McLaglen's demobilization with a minimum of distinction, a fair share of entertainment. Most tedious noise: McLaglen's guffaw.

Wedding Present (Paramount). Cinema newspaper people, merely drunken sots a few years ago, have kept on topping each other's efforts in irresponsibility. Currently newshawks on the screen are, with few exceptions (see below), practically indistinguishable from run-of-the-mill lunatics. Wedding Present turns a couple of these creatures loose to follow the bidding of their erratic temperaments. The result, however insulting to the dignity of the trade, is efficacious and at times uproarious comedy.

Rusty (Joan Bennett) and Charlie (Gary Grant) would have been married if Charlie had not tried to be too funny with the marriage-bureau clerk. Rusty's way of revealing that her sensibilities have been hurt is thereafter to outgag the waggish Charlie. Rusty cheats Charlie out of a vacation. He retaliates by taking over the city desk, making himself unpleasant to his onetime colleagues. Rusty hires the world's most obnoxious office boy to annoy him, has his office painted in zebra stripes. Heartbroken when he hears she is to marry Roger Dodacker. success story writer (Conrad Nagel). Charlie arranges a wedding present for her by sending her a fire engine and a riot squad, an ambulance and an undertaker to Dodacker. In the last shot, Rusty and Charlie are on the roof of an ambulance headed for an insane asylum.

The story is by Fictionist-Sports Writer Paul Gallico, whose years on the sports desk of the New York Daily News doubtless make him a world authority on difficult newspaper temperaments.

Adventure in Manhattan (Columbia). Endowed with psychic intuition enabling him to predict crimes before they occur, an eccentric young reporter (Joel Mc-Crea) uses this gift to foil an international thief (Reginald Owen), shock his editor, captivate a young actress (Jean Arthur).

Columbia's It Happened One Night, which was the work of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra, proved to the industry that production cost is not indispensable to box-office success. Adventure in Manhattan, which is not the work of Writer Robert Riskin and Director Frank Capra, may conceivably prove to the producers of It Happened One Night that box-office success is not necessarily the reward of second-hand whimsey.

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