The New Pictures

Come and Get It (Samuel Goldwyn) gives Actor Edward Arnold, recently seen as Diamond Jim Brady and General John Sutter, another subject for his full-length screen portraiture of hearty, colorful U. S. types. Lifted this time from Edna Ferber fiction instead of history, the subject is Bernard Glasgow, Wisconsin lumber millionaire. The result, against a background first of lumber camps and small-town saloons, later of early 20th-century urban plutocracy, is an extraordinarily warm and lively picture of one of the few romantic aspects of the U. S. which the cinema has so far neglected.

To rise from head of a timber crew in the north woods to the partnership he has set his heart on, Barney Glasgow has to do more than spur his gang on to a record cutting. He has to marry the boss's unappealing daughter. For this high hurdle in ambition's path he gets up courage by a brief affair with a dance-hall hostess (Frances Farmer), not the least of whose charms is a convenient knack of converting beer trays into lethal missiles in a barroom brawl. When Glasgow goes off to marry his heiress, the eccentric Swede foreman (Walter Brennan) who has been his best friend stays on to marry the dance-hall girl. It takes a full generation for Barney Glasgow to count the gains and losses of this move. The final audit comes when, the richest man in the State, he discovers in the old Swede's daughter the image of his old flame. Barney showers benefits on the family. His efforts to renew his youth by making the young girl his mistress are frustrated by her romance with his son (Joel McCrea).

Come and Get It was budgeted by expansive Producer Goldwyn at $1,000,000. It cost 25% more. Part of the increase was caused by delay when Director Howard Hawks quit, after differences of opinion with Producer Goldwyn, to be replaced by William Wyler. Part was caused by Stunt Director Richard Rosson's discovery, when he went to the north woods to photograph lumberjacks riding falling trees or breaking up log jams, that these daring practices, familiar to preceding generations of lumberjacks, are scorned by contemporaries as unsophisticated generosity to their employers. He had to return to Hollywood to recruit a crew of fake lumberjacks with enough courage to do what real lumberjacks are supposed to do. Included in the uproar concerning production of Come and Get It was the story which billed Actress Andrea Leeds as Hollywood's "kiss champion'' after she had spent more than nine hours kissing three young actors to test their ability to play the role of her fiance in the film. Winner was tall, tennis-playing Francis Xavier Shields. In the course of the picture, he and Actress Leeds (Barney's daughter) kiss neither each other nor anyone else.

Under Your Spell (Twentieth Century-Fox) represents a determined effort to sell Lawrence Tibbett, whose appeal has heretofore been confined to music lovers, to the cinemasses. The means chosen are direct. Instead of a pretentious story against grand opera background, the dramatic material is farce comedy about a concert singer who, bothered by an over-efficient publicity manager (Gregory Ratoff), goes into retirement on a ranch only to have his quiet disturbed by the spoiled debutante (Wendy Barrie) whom he eventually marries. Instead of warmed-over grand opera, the musical accompaniment consists mainly of popular airs composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.

Unfortunately, the unpretentiousness intended to endear Under Your Spell to large numbers of cinemaddicts is of a sort more likely to ensure it second rating on double-feature programs. Best shot: the baritone's frozen-faced valet (Arthur Treacher) giving a cowboy cheer when he learns that his master is returning to New York.

Yellow Cargo (Grand National) will have a sobering effect on anyone who might be tempted to smuggle Chinese into the U. S. One way to do it is made clear by Perrelli (Jack La Rue). As a blind for his operations, he sets up a motion-picture studio. He makes no pictures, but every day sends a group of extras in Chinese costumes to a small island off the California coast. The extras come back by ferry in their ordinary clothes; the smuggled Chinese, picked up at the island, replace the extras in Perrelli's launch. Allan (Conrad Nagel) is a onetime actor sent out as a secret agent by the Department of Immigration. He is helped by Bobbie (Eleanor Hunt), a newshawk who also turns out to be a G-girl. The climax is a chase in which the villains conceal their Ford from the pursuers by putting it inside a truck. In lighting, acting and direction, Yellow Cargo is reminiscent of the films which cinemaddicts now well on toward middle age once played hooky to see. As such it is beguiling but a little startling as the product of a new company scheduled to make 52 pictures this year.

The first time most U. S. cinemaddicts heard of Grand National was last summer when it announced that it had signed Actor James Cagney to make two pictures a year. The company had been formed a few weeks prior, largely through the efforts of a onetime Omaha theatre usher named Edward L. Alperson. Risen to be head buyer for the Skouras Brothers' chain of 550 theatres, Mr. Alperson long ago became convinced that double-feature bills had come to stay, saw in them an increased demand for wholesale production. When Pathe Film Corp. was last spring trying to reorganize its string of exchanges, Buyer Alperson gave up his Skouras job to take them over and to organize Grand National, to supply entertainment product.

Grand National has no Hollywood studio of its own, plans to fill its schedule with the output of unit producers working on other lots and each turning out from two to six pictures a year. Of its 52 pictures, 75% will be inexpensively designed to fill out double bills. Outside of Actor Cagney, Grand National's most valuable names are those of Actresses Mae Clarke and Eleanor Hunt, Actors Conrad Nagel, Tex Ritter, and John Payne, Director John Blystone and Producers Boris Petroff, Douglas MacLean and Bennie Zeidman. Next major Grand National effort will be Cagney's Great Guy.

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