The New Pictures

Go West Young Man (Paramount). When Mae West made her cinema debut in 1932 (Night After Night), wiseacres predicted her career would be short-lived. When she became a star (1933), critics considered her a fad. When the Legion of Decency was formed (1934), Mae West seemed its most likely victim. Currently, though she slipped from fifth to eleventh in Motion Picture Herald's star-rating, Mae West is still one of Hollywood's highest paid ($150,000 per picture) celebrities, unique in two respects: 1) She writes her own scripts. 2) While other producers are trying to be dainty, she tries to be ribald. In Go West Young Man, derived from Lawrence Riley's play Personal Appearnace, her efforts are, as usual, successful.

Mavis Arden, a famed cinemactress on tour with her publicity agent (Warren William), has only one insterest in life, which it is his job to frustrate. The interest is men. In Washington, Mavis meets a Congressman (Lyle Talbot), makes an engagement for the next night in Harrisburg. To prevent her from keeping it, Pressagent Stevens sees to it that her car breaks down en route. Forced to stay over a country boardinghouse, she wastes no time getting down to business. She spots a young mechanic under her car, murmurs, "Look at those strong and sinewy muscles," sidles outdoors to make his acquaintance.

The mechanic (Randolph Scott) has an invention. Says Mavis: "I'd just love to see your model." The examination takes place in a barn. When it is over, Mavis Arden decides that she will take the young inventor back to Hollywood. Her plan is frustrated by Pressagent Stevens. By dangling tiny garments in front of her, he convinces her that the young man's fiancee is pregnant, causing Mavis to snort: "Fine goings on around here!" By the time she learns that the young man's relations with his fiancee are not premature, the situation has considerably changed. She loses interest in both the inventor and the Congressman, rides off wrapped around the pressagent. Greater than her importance to the U. S. cinema public, which could presumably get along without her, is Mae West's importance as a lexicon of those slouching wisecracks, grimy proverbs and reckless, light-hearted double-entendres without which the great mass of the U. S. population would be almost inarticulate. In go West Young Man, she delivers a full quota which will doubtless become, immediately and indelibly, part of the U. S. jargon. When her escort demands a quiet table for two, her comment is, "You know, seclusive." Worried, she remarks: "I must have a moment or two ... to commute with myself." To her young inventor she coins a proverb: "I always said 'Science is Golden'."

Theodora Goes Wild (Columbia). When the Lynnfield Literary Society met to ban a best-seller named Sinned Against, pretty Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne) cast her vote with the rest. No one in Lynnfield knew that, under the nom de plume of Caroline Adams, she had written the book herself. Until its illustrator, Michael Grant (Melvyn Douglas), who had met Theodora on one of her rare trips to New York, arrived in Lynnnfield, there seemed no danger that her double life would be exposed. By good-humored blackmail, Grant compelled Theodora to persuade her maiden aunts to give him a job as gardener. Then he persuaded her to go berry-picking in trousers, fishing on Sunday morning and, in a final grand explosion of her inhibitions, to break with her aunts. In doing so Theodora also announced her love for him. At this point, Grant was quick to see that he had bitten off more than he could chew.

Grant's reason for following Theodora to Lynnfield was to show her that she was inhibited. Having followed Grant to New York, Theodora made it her business to show Grant that he was in the same predicament, only more so. She moved into his apartment, scandalized his family by behaving like an adventuress, contrived to become corespondent in not one divorce suit but two. By this time, Grant's repressions were as thoroughly shattered as her own and the secret of Caroline Adams identity had made red-ink headlines in the Lynnfield Bugle. When Theodora returned there, she found Grant and a brass band. For cinema patrons who like rollicking farce, Theodora Goes Wild amounts to a feast. It begins rollicking in Reel One, rollicks faster and more furiously from there on. Most rollicking shot: the wife of Theodora's publisher peeking out of her door to see her drunken husband and Theodora rollicking harmlessly on the floor.

Make Way for a Lady (RKO) is a resounding contribution to the Five Little Peppers school of cinema, showing what happens when a suburban high-school girl (Anne Shirley) undertakes to manage the sex life of her widowed father (Herbert Marshall). Convinced that he is in love with a lady novelist (Margot Grahame), she tries to wreck his romance with a schoolteacher (Gertrude Michael), does not quite succeed.

Implicit in the writing, acting and direction of Make Way for a Lady, a conviction that the picture is completely charming helps to obliterate any trace of charm which it might otherwise have possessed. Most tedious shot: Actress Shirley's simper.

Pennies from Heaven (Columbia) is a textbook example of the oldest adage in cinemaking: Nothing ruins a picture more effectively than too many good ideas. Best idea wasted is the character of Larry (Bing Crosby), a jailbird minstrel whose most prized possession is a 13th-Century lute, in an elaborate routine, involving a letter from a condemned man to Patsy Smith (Edith Fellowes), orphan of a murdered father. "Pennies from Heaven--the coins tossed down to him from tenement windows--are the currency with which Larry undertakes to support Patsy and her Grandpa (Donald Meek).

There is one moment of real magic when Larry is singing So Do I, best of the John Burke-Arthur Johnston ballads, in a dim courtyard, strumming his lute, while Patsy revolves around him in a grotesquely graceful, childish dance. Screenwriter Jo Swerling, however, quickly dropped development of the Pennies from Heaven idea. He set his characters to making a haunted house into a night club, then switched to a carnival background, then to an orphan asylum. The thread on which the latter episodes are strung consists of Susan Sprague's (Madge Evans) efforts to put Patsy in the orphan home and win the love of Crosby. By that time even such good songs as One, Two-- Button Your Shoe and Let's Call a Heart a Heart are beginning to suffer from the audience's apprehension that the next sequence may be pennies from heaven in a submarine, or pennies from heaven with the Spanish Revolution. Best bit: black Louis Armstrong with his band rendering "Skeleton in the Closet."

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