The New Pictures

Reunion (Twentieth Century-Fox) is the second instalment of the fictionized "Biography of the Dionne Quintuplets." In the first chapter, The Country Doctor (TIME, March 16), the famed Five were the most important characters in the story.

In Reunion they are incidental. Chaperoned by their amiable nurse (Dorothy Peterson), for eight of the picture's 80 minutes they waddle about with normal two-year-old awkwardness and silence, blowing horns, tumbling over cribs, pounding a piano, guzzling milk and sucking thumbs in the familiar quinsome way. For the rest of the show they might just as well not have been born.

This is because their role is only that of five guests at a get-together in Moosetown, Canada, of the 3,000 people whom Dr. Luke (Jean Hersholt) has brought into the world. The occasion is supposed to be a great party for his honor and enjoyment. Actually, it becomes almost as great a drain on his resources as a Mr. Fix-It as was the birth of the quintuplets on his skill as an obstetrician. In one afternoon he finds himself obliged, as mentor for the 3,000, to: 1) succor a suicidal cinemactress, 2) trick a U. S. Governor into adopting a child, 3) bring his assistant and his nurse together, 4) save an old friend from losing his young wife. All this leaves the audience with renewed conviction that sequels are rarely as good as the first instalment.

Love on the Run (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Sally (Joan Crawford) is a fabulously rich U. S. heiress engaged to Igor (Ivan Lebedeff), fabulously torpid European fortune hunter. She leaves him waiting at the church to run off with Michael (Clark Gable), fabulously adroit U. S. reporter. After junketing in Europe by airplane, delivery truck and wheelbarrow, they spend a night in the palace at Fontainebleau. Michael then tells Sally simultaneously that 1) he loves her and 2) he has been using their escapade to make headlines in the U. S. Sally takes up with Michael's gullible rival reporter (Franchot Tone). Michael follows her, effects a reconciliation. Rash Sally falls into the clutches of two international spies who have been shadowing her since Reel 1. Brave Michael rescues her.

If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ever presents a prize for the picture which best exemplifies all the faults and all the virtues of all the pictures made in any given year, Love on the Run should win it. From the first word in its title to the last shot on the screen, of Crawford kissing Gable, it represents a kind of bright, composite photograph which, for historians, might be labeled Mass Entertainment 1936. Important only to historians, the median 1936 cinema should please the average 1936 cinemaddict. Average shot: Franchot Tone telling Joan Crawford a knock-knock: "Machiavelli good suit for $10."

Lloyd's of London (Twentieth Century-Fox). In The House of Rothschild (1934), Producer Darryl Zanuck imparted to a waiting world the news that the Battle of Waterloo was won by George Arliss and a flock of pigeons. In this picture, the same Wahoo, Neb. authority on the Napoleonic Wars reveals the inside story of Trafalgar. England's victory in this case, it appears, sprang from a childish pact between Admiral Horatio Nelson and Jonathan Blake, the moving spirit of Lloyd's, London's famed insurance company.

Young Blake (Freddie Bartholomew), wharf-rat nephew of a Yarmouth ginshop hostess, and young Nelson (Douglas Scott) swear to take any dare proposed by the other. When they overhear a captain plotting to scuttle his ship after removing its cargo of gold, they agree to run away from home together to carry the news to Lloyd's. Nelson breaks the pact to go to sea as a midshipman on his uncle's man-o'-war. Blake goes alone to London, where a chimney sweep (D'Arcy Corrigan) directs him to Lloyd's coffee house. The news he brings gets him the friendship of Insurance Broker John Julius Angerstein (Sir Guy Standing), a foothold in the ring of marine underwriters.

The years that make Nelson's name a byword throughout England make Blake (Tyrone Power) a rising power in the syndicates. Like young Rothschild, he devises a scheme for speeding up news. Instead of pigeons, he has a semaphore to flash messages across the English channel. While operating his system, Blake meets a mysterious young English girl (Madeleine Carroll ) at Calais. When she turns out to be Lady Elizabeth Stacy, wife of a foppish young peer (George Sanders), frustrated Blake puts all his energies into Lloyd's. He has made himself head of its most powerful syndicate when his semaphore brings the news that the French have sunk 63 British merchant ships off the Azores. All of Lloyd's insurance men are on the brink of ruin.

Rallying under Angerstein, the older brokers at Lloyd's propose to ask the British admiralty for naval convoys for merchant ships. Sure that this plan, which requires weakening Nelson's fighting fleet, means ultimate defeat for England, Blake holds out against it. When a letter from the admiral reminds him of their boyhood promise, Blake takes the desperate chance of using his semaphore to flash news of a naval victory which has not happened. The ruse delays the admiralty's plan until Nelson, with his full fleet at his command, has won gloriously and died at Trafalgar. Wounded by jealous Lord Stacy--whose wife is now ready to divorce him--Blake recuperates in time to see his old friend's catafalque go by.

That the theme of news--pigeons in Rothschild, the semaphore in Lloyd's--recurs in Producer Darryl Zanuck's major works is not entirely accidental. Famed for his knack of translating headlines into cinema, Zanuck sees history as a collection of front-page stories. Making insurance seem glamorous might sound like a superhuman tour de force. Lloyd's of London, rich in the atmospheric detail of all good period pieces, warm with the honest adulation which English heroes alone seem capable of inspiring in Hollywood producers, is an insurance drummer's daydream. It makes the business as exciting as a bugle call, magnificently sombre as the roll of muffled drums. Good shots: Benjamin Franklin sitting down at Lloyd's with Boswell and Sam Johnson; Lloyd's bell, rung twice for good news, once for bad, tolling out the tragedy of the Azores.

Born to Dance (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Put out for the holiday trade, this big, glittering musical has the air of a department store Christmas tree, wreathed with looping streamers of Cole Porter music and twinkling patches of young dancing. Proper in proportion and dazzle are its two large production packages: 1) Rolling Home sung by Ted (James Stewart), Gunny Saks (Sid Silvers) and Mush (Buddy Ebsen) with a chorus of sailors; 2) Swingin' the Jinx Away, the monumental finale, sung by everybody on top of the tree.

Brilliantly spotted in 14 supremely efficient and separate styles of dancing is Nora (Eleanor Powell), a girl who lives in the Lonely Hearts Club and learns to love a boy. Authors Jack McGowan & Sid Silvers were not trying to be original even when they made the ship that brings Ted, Mush & Gunny home a submarine instead of the usual dreadnought. Everybody seems satisfied with the plot as they pair off in the Lonely Hearts Club with Hey, Babe, Hey! a novelty song and dance that is the season's high for cinemusical contagion. Frances Langford is a good dancer for a girl who can sing as well as she can and Buddy Ebsen, her foil, has a good comedy voice considering he is also the No. 1 U. S. eccentric tap dancer. With Una Merkel and Sid Silvers clowning through the Cole Porter words and Eleanor Powell tapping out her specialized magic, the whole cast suddenly gives out the feeling that comes to a show when all hands are tops in their lines and happy with what they are doing. Plot is forgotten, the Christmas tree is spangled with dialog as amiably frivolous as artificial snow and lighted up with rows of handsome specialties, three of which stand out: Reginald Gardiner as a park policeman leading an invisible orchestra; Barnett Parker as a sissy floorwalker demonstrating a model home; a ballroom dance number by Georges & Jama. Best songs: Rap, Tap On Wood by Powell, Easy to Love by Powell & Stewart, I've Got You Under My Skin by Virginia Bruce.

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