The New Pictures

Head Over Heels in Love (Gaumont-British) represents a heroic attempt on the part of England's major cinema company to get out a genuine U. S.-type musical comedy without infringing upon strict British cinema-quota laws. For industry and ambition, the effort deserves top marks. The producers not only imported Hollywood Scenarist Dwight Taylor, U. S. Songwriters Mack Gordon & Harry Revel and Manhattan Actress Whitney Bourne, they even used a back stage plot about a cabaret entertainer who becomes a radio singer while her partner (Louis Borell) goes to Hollywood, laid the scene in Paris, dressed the star as much as possible like Eleanor Powell.

Unfortunately the British trait of muddling through is more effective in international politics than in light entertainment. Where Head Over Heels in Love differs most markedly from a U. S.-made musical comedy it is hard to say. Possibly it is just where its director, Sonnie Hale, felt surest that he was on the right track, as in the scene in which his wife, Jessie Matthews, sings something called Don't Give a Good Gosh Darn with an enthusiasm that betrays only too clearly her exhilaration at the thought that she must sound just like Ruby Keeler. Through the rest of the picture, Director Hale concentrates unhappily upon his wife's teeth, which are not her best points, instead of her legs, which are. Good songs : Lookin' Around Corners, May I Have the Next Romance With You.

Green Light (Warner). This adaptation of Lloyd C. Douglas' 1935 best-seller exhibits Errol Flynn, last seen in the uniform of a British lancer in The Charge of the Light Brigade, somewhat less advantageously swathed in the white tunic of a U. S. medico. He is Dr. Newell Paige, an irreligious but idealistic young surgeon who, when a patient dies because of a blunder by his superior, generously takes the blame. The daughter (Anita Louise) of the mishap's victim likes Dr. Paige at first sight, hates him when she suspects him of being responsible for her mother's death. When this situation has been straightened out by the surgical nurse (Margaret Lindsay) who was on the case, and when Dr. Paige has risked his life in a foolhardy experiment to find a spotted-fever serum, there is not much left of Green Light except the sediment of kindergarten metaphysics which gave the book its mass appeal. In the picture, this sediment is represented by Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Dean Harcourt, a strangely overwrought clergyman who, when the other characters come to him for counsel, expounds to them his naive conception of human affairs. "I like to think of civilization as a parade," he observes, making the point that mass destiny is more important than the fate of the individual. Somewhere else among the Dean's motor-minded messages upon Good & Evil there occurs the traffic-signal metaphor that gives the work its title.

Cinema treatments of philosophical fiction, however modest the thought content may be, face obvious disadvantages. Thoughtfully directed by Frank Borzage, Green Light does not surmount them but it achieves a certain negative distinction because Sir Cedric Hardwicke, by exercise of almost superhuman skill, not only prevents Dean Harcourt's mouthings from seeming clownish but even gives them dignity. Most inevitable shot: readings on Dr. Paige's fever chart, after he has inoculated himself with a deadly germ, which show that he will recover.

We're on the Jury (RKO) presents a bitterly satirical idea in a blatantly slapstick manner--as if Sinclair Lewis suddenly took to writing like Robert Benchley and did it badly. After a brief murder trial, a "typical jury" of four women and eight men retires. On the first ballot, the vote is eleven to one for "Guilty." But socialite Mrs. Dean (Helen Broderick) stands for acquittal because her intuition tells her to. By every means known to feminine wile, she begins winning over the others. She coaxes Realtor J. Clarence Beaver (Victor Moore) by calling him "Pudgy," recalling their childhood days.

She courts Cellist Allen (Billy Gilbert) by promising a musicale. She persuades a voracious professor by giving him most of her supper. Presently the eleven badgered people agree with her verdict of "Not Guilty"--which happens to be just.

Adapted from Minnie Maddern Fiske's onetime vehicle Ladies of the Jury by John Frederick Ballard, We're on the Jury drags badly, lacks subtlety, is made bearable only by the comic skill of Helen Broderick and Victor Moore.

John Meade's Woman (Paramount). John Meade (Edward Arnold) ruled a lumber kingdom so that he could decimate it. After he had cut down all the trees, the rain ran off the hills like water off a window pane. Drought shriveled the farmlands under the pillaged hills, so John Meade bought up bankrupt homesteads, thinking that since the trees were gone he could make a new fortune out of wheat. The farmers made straw images of John Meade which they hung up by the neck and set on fire. They sullenly retained the lands and houses he foreclosed. When John Meade telephoned for militia, the Governor was unpleasant. "An army is on its way to you, John Meade," he said, "an army that will clean out those farmers for you, sweep away the shacks they live in, and blow the John Meade enterprises off the map of this State. Dust. . . . You created it. ... You and your kind. ... It will get into your mouth, into your eyes and throat; I hope it gets into your soul." As a capsule of anticapitalism, John Meade's Woman contains as much undisguised explosive as such polemic documents as Black Fury and Black Legion, far more than the sotto-voce pleas for oppressed peoples that Clifford Odets, U. S. proletarian playwright No. 1, whispered behind his hand in The General Died at Dawn. As such, it is a piece of shrewd showmanship on the part of Producer Benjamin Percival Schulberg, who, reflecting on the human as well as the geological phenomena conspicuous in head lines from last summer's drought country, refrains from comment on them other than the changes that take place in John Meade's soul after the dust gets into it.

That part of John Meade's Woman which is geared to these phenomena is an effectively written, well-photographed slice of U. S. industrial history. Less effective is the overlong recital of the process by which John Meade comes to jilt his society sweetheart (Gail Patrick) by marriage with the humblest woman he can find (Francine Larrimore). At times patently uneasy with the camera's quiet tempo, Miss Larrimore on the whole does well in her first screening, especially when she gets a chance to turn on high-tension dramatics. Her best scene: telling John Meade why she has decided to visit a cabaret with her chauffeur (John Trent).

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