The New Pictures

Parnell (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) exhibits Clark Gable and Myrna Loy as Charles Parnell and Katie O'Shea in a screen version of the play by the late Elsie Schauffler (TIME, Nov. 25. 1935). As a cinema production, Parnell ranks high. Everything in it, from the London fog to the handles on the doors of Parliament, rebuilt life-size on a sound stage, is scrupulously authentic. As history, it ranks low, since it not only telescopes Parnell's career but also whitewashes it to suit the Hays office. As entertainment, it ranks in between. The screen play by John Van Druten & S. N. Behrman is literate but logy; John Stahl's direction is stately but pedestrian; Myrna Loy behaves as though she missed The Thin Man, and not even mutton chop whiskers and a turret-top collar can make Clark Gable look, sound or act like the uncrowned King of Ireland.

Descended on his father's side from the first Earl of Warwick, on his mother's from Commodore Charles Stewart of Virginia, Parnell spent a year on his brother's Alabama peach farm long before he ever contemplated a political career. The picture picks up his story five years after his original election to Parliament, when he has become leader of the fight for Ireland's Home Rule. The climax of Parnell's career has been ably studied in a recent biography (Parnell, by Joan Haslip) as well as in Author Schauffler's play. He vindicated himself of complicity in Dublin's grisly Phoenix Park murders, got Gladstone to back his Home Rule bill, fell in love with red-haired Katie O'Shea. Her husband Willie connived at their romance until it suited his purpose to sue for divorce. When Parnell failed to defend the suit, he lost not only the public that had idolized him but Gladstone's support for his bill and all chance of Home Rule for Ireland. He died a year later.

Like many historic happenings, Parnell's rise & fall contain potentialities of majestic drama. This picture explains Willie's suit for divorce as a somewhat transparent device to blackmail Parnell into giving him a political job. It shows Parnell dying of a stroke almost immediately after his Party has deserted him and before his marriage to Katie. It is at its best in earlier sequences showing Parnell speaking in Parliament at the time of the trial arising from the Phoenix Park case. Best bit part: Brandon Tynan, Dublin-born actor, who got 27 curtain calls the night in 1902 when he appeared in New York in the title role of a play about Irish Patriot Robert Emmet, as J. F. X. O'Brien, oldest member of the Home Rule Party.

African Holiday. In 1935 Harry C. Pearson, a onetime Chicago insurance-man, took his wife and camera to Central Africa, trekked 11,000 miles through the jungle. A plotless safari, the Pearson film record lavishes hazy shots of cheetahs, lions, tigers, giraffes, antelopes, elephants, hippopotamuses, assorted naked savages, waving grass. Goriest scenes are young Masai tribesmen sucking up the blood of a dead bullock, black coolies scooping out elephant feet to make wastebaskets for the U.S. market. Cinematic Afrophiles will relish the rare, sleek okapi, a herd of sunbathing hippos, the giant Latukas whose hunters tower seven feet tall, and the mystic snake dance of the Mariari cult.

The Go-Getter (Warners) revives Cappy Ricks, amiable curmudgeon of magazine stories by Peter B. Kyne, in the person of Comedian Charles Winninger, whose specialty of impersonating vaguely nautical characters was developed on stage and screen in Show Boat. The danger of an old stand-by like Cappy Ricks is that even 1937 cinemaddicts, with their amazing willingness to lap up stale treacle of all sorts, are likely to find him a little too outmoded. The device used to circumvent this possibility in The Go-Getter is the elaborate but effective one of opening the action with the 1935 wreck of the dirigible Macon and presenting, as the picture's romantic lead, a heroic survivor who has lost a leg in that comparatively up-to-date catastrophe. The story thereafter concerns the efforts of Go-Getter Bill Austin (George Brent) to make a place for himself in the Ricks Lumber and Navigation Co. and to marry dear little Margaret Ricks (Anita Louise). Little Margaret's father Cappy views the later project with alarm but, of course, the Go-Getter goes & gets. Amiable, rapid and pleasant to watch, The Go-Getter's sole significance is that it definitely establishes Actor Winninger, with Victor Moore, George Arliss and Wallace Beery, as another contender for the position of the late Will Rogers in the affection of U. S. cinemaddicts. Typical shot: Cappy delivering his favorite oath, "By the holy pink-toed prophet," when he learns that, despite his instructions to the contrary, Bill and Margaret have eloped to China.

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