The New Pictures

Seventh Heaven (Twentieth Century-Fox). When Chico (James Stewart), Paris sewer rat whose ambition was to be a street-washer, rescued Diane (Simone Simon) from her sister, who was beating her with a strap, he wondered why he did it. His emotions became even more puzzling when, after he had agreed to give Diane temporary shelter in his garret, he found that he did not want to let her go. Not until he saw Diane in a wedding dress he had bought her, did it finally dawn on him that he was in love. That was on the day in 1914 that War started. They had barely time to improvise a marriage ceremony before Chico left for the front.

In Diane's mind, there was never any doubt about what was happening and why. Knowing Chico gave her the courage to walk across the catwalk from his room to his neighbor, Street-washer Gobin, and, later, to chase her mean sister (Gale Sondergaard) downstairs. It gave her the courage also, when she got news of Chico's death, not to believe it. After the Armistice was signed, Diane put the onion soup on the stove early to have it ready when he got back. At supper time, Chico was there.

In 1927, a silent Seventh Heaven, adapted from Austin Strong's play, made Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell the top cinema stars of their era, Frank Borzage its most eminent director. Whether the current version of the story will have the same effect remains highly dubious. Contemporary cinematic fashion calls for overdressed sentimentality masquerading as sophistication. Seventh Heaven's strongest quality is sophisticated simplicity which, for the naive, may make its fragile little story seem even more sentimental than it is. Nonetheless, despite flaws in Henry King's direction and in Melville Baker's dialog when it occurred to them that the picture needed purple patches, Seventh Heaven retains most of its original persuasiveness. Even the alarming contrast between Simone Simon's baby-car-riage French accent and James Stewart's adenoidal Princeton one, gives their scenes together--of which the picture is largely composed--a pleasantly improbable quality in full keeping with the story's unrealistic mood. Good shot: Chico and Diane celebrating his debut as a street-washer with a dinner to the Gobins.

Waikiki Wedding (Paramount) exhibits Bing Crosby crooning pseudo-Hawaiian ditties through a wreath to the accompaniment of innumerable hula-hulas. As Tony Marvin, he is the indolent press-agent of Imperial Pineapple, spends his time lolling on his schooner with a hillbilly called Shad Buggle (Bob Burns). One of Marvin's sporadic publicity ideas is to choose a "Pineapple Girl" who would come to Hawaii for three weeks, syndicate her enthusiastic impressions. Winner is one Georgia Smith (Shirley Ross) of Birch Falls, Iowa, who wants romance not pineapple. Imperial Pineapple orders Tony to provide it. When crooning fails, he stages a mock kidnapping by the natives, who accuse the "Pineapple Girl" of stealing the black pearl which keeps their volcano quiet. The kanakas carry the two men, Miss Smith and her loud companion (Martha Raye) to an isolated island to appease the erupting volcano. Miss Smith finds romance, to the vast relief of Imperial Pineapple.

This mild pleasantry is as excellently suited to Bing Crosby's mild acting talents as its soft Hawaiian tunes (Momi Pele, Okolehau, Nani Ona Pua) are suited to his deep warbling. Comedy is ladled out by Martha Raye, who distorts her vast mouth and yowls, and by Bob Burns, who to get laughs uses a pig named Wafford instead of his former "Bazooka." This amiable razorback is by far the funniest member of the trio, steals the show by oinking at suitable moments, winning a blue ribbon at a dog-show, then exhibiting a most distinctive canine trait when walking down a street.

Silent Barriers (Gaumont British) amounts to one more indication that Great Britain's cinema industry would do well to give Hollywood an exclusive franchise on celebrations of the British Empire's past. To make a dull picture about the 1886 building of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Rockies, climaxed by the fight between Canadian Pacific's William Cornelius Van Home and Great Northern's James Jerome Hill, sounds difficult. Silent Barriers--for which Director Milton Rosmer took cast and crew to Revelstoke, B. C. and endangered all their lives to photograph a forest fire--makes it look discouragingly easy. With the exception of a few shots of the fire, mountain peaks and raging rapids, the picture contains nothing that could not have been better photographed in a studio or better still not photographed at all.

The King and the Chorus Girl (Warner Brothers) starts with a sequence in which a Paris doctor diagnoses the alarming coma of young ex-King Alfred (Fernand Gravet). "Never in my entire life," he tells the ex-King's ex-Chancellor (Edward Everett Horton), "have I ever seen anyone so completely drunk." Between this sequence and the picture's last, exhibiting an ocean liner at Niagara Falls, The King and the Chorus Girl whirls through a series of urbanely insane and expertly executed narrative gyrations which make it probably the most unique and certainly the most enjoyable light comedy of the season.

When finally aroused, ex-King Alfred proceeds from his customary breakfast of brandy direct to the Folies Bergere, where ennui induced by watching the can-can restores him to a stupor. On the advice of the ex-King's doctor, his ex-Chancellor and ex-lady-in-waiting (Mary Nash) hatch a plot to give him a new interest in life. This consists of persuading a chorus girl who momentarily attracts his attention to alter the monotony of his unvarying success with women by not falling in love with him. The plan has the desired effect upon the King but the chorus girl (Joan Blondell), finding herself incapable of keeping her side of the bargain, embarks to go home to Brooklyn. The explanation of the liner's complete lack of other passengers eludes her until, strolling about on deck, she encounters the ex-King, who has chartered it for the trip. When the wedding ceremony has been performed, ex-King Alfred orders the captain to take the ship to Niagara Falls, It goes there.

The fact that Groucho Marx receives screen credit as co-author with Norman Krasna of The King and the Chorus Girl, may to some extent account for the picture's utterly amoral and pleasantly lucid lunacy. So may the fine comedy sense of Director Mervyn Le Roy, making his debut as a producer. Any added fillip given the story by plot resemblances to recent developments in European affairs can, since it went into production last October, be considered a happy accident, as can the facial resemblance of Actor Fernand Gravet to the Duke of Windsor when the Duke was a young and dashing Prince of Wales.

Definitely Hollywood's comic find of the year, Actor Gravet, who changed his name from Graavey lest "people get me mixed up with the national dish," is a 31-year-old French-Belgian, who learned his precise English at England's St. Paul's School which he attended during the War.

Producer Le Roy, who had seen him in French pictures and on the stage of the little theatre which Actor Gravet and his wife run in Paris, persuaded him to sign a contract for three pictures by promising to select and direct them all. Having completed the first, afraid of losing his appeal for U. S. audiences by becoming too thoroughly Americanized, Actor Gravet recently returned to Paris, where he maintains an army of 30,000 toy soldiers of which a few members always travel with their owner.

Quality Street (RKO) is James M. Barrie's fantasy about the ringleted Phoebe Throssel (Katharine Hepburn) who lets the dashing Dr. Valentine Brown (Franchot Tone) go off to fight Napoleon, not dreaming that he loves her, and has to win him back after a ten-year hiatus has swallowed up her ringlets. Struck to the heart because he fails to recognize gaunt-faced Schoolmistress Throssel as the girl whom he once compared, in a nice turn of rhetoric, to a garden, she creates a new identity for herself--that of Livvy, her imaginary niece. Artifice having restored the necessary ringlets, dashing Valentine conspires to his own defeat. After succumbing to her petticoat ambush, he saves the reputation of Miss Throssel by sending home the coquettish Livvy in the form of a bolster in shawl and bonnet, under the scandal-hungry eyes of all Quality Street.

Barrie wrote Quality Street in 1900. Some of the tired gaiety still clinging to its voluminous and lacy folds might have been revitalized if Producer Pandro Berman and his aids had overcome their reverence for Sir James Barrie.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.