The New Pictures

That Certain Woman (First National-Warner Bros.). Warner Brothers paid $25,000 in court costs in England last fall to compel high-spirited Bette Davis to return to the fold after her rebellion against playing an uncongenial part (in God's Country and the Woman), and her demand that her salary be increased was refused. Actress Davis herself spent $18,000 opposing the action, could be made to pay the $25,000 court costs as well, since the studio has not yet executed its judgment against her for the amount.

In less precarious times, the role she is given in That Certain Woman might conceivably have evoked renewed protest from her, not that it lacks scope for her remarkable dramatic range, but because it heaps tragedy upon her with Sophoclean relentlessness, and because its wearying, buskined tread cannot pretend to vie with her more smartly-stepping 1937 successes, Marked Woman and Kid Galahad.

The story thrusts Bette Davis, as the widow of a slain gangster, into a topsy-turvy milieu, in which she becomes secretary to a whimsical and unhappily married lawyer (Ian Hunter) and the one-night bride of a thoroughbred weakling (Henry Fonda). His uncompromising father forces an annulment, the young man goes obediently abroad to marry another (Anita Louise), unaware that he is leaving an unborn son behind him. On this star-crossed situation there follow several slow-footed years, distinguished in the film by bright directorial fillips and badly managed transitions, while the Furies mobilize for the unreasonable onslaught that is to come. Author-Director Edmund Goulding supplies what the film industry knows as a Keystone finish (and a happy one).

That Certain Woman is what is known as a players' picture; everyone gets the call, and everyone responds with all the theatrical craft he can summon up. It indicates a lesson learned from the Britons and the French: the tendency to use big-name players in parts that come close to being "bits."

Something to Sing About (Grand National) is nothing to make a song about, but it returns two-fisted Cinemactor James Cagney to his theatrical nonage of 1924, when he was just one of the boys tapping routines in vaudeville. Though still unable to startle the dance world, he does unveil a new, more versatile Cagney. As Terry Rooney, Manhattan band leader, he is called to Hollywood for the great opportunity. He leaves his girl, Rita (Evelyn Daw), to wait until he has demonstrated once more how a star is born. Studio specialists on clothes, coiffure, and voice view him with alarm. He refuses a Robert Taylor widow's peak, practices voice culture with, "The Dyuke blyew on his hunting horn and loffed, ha, ha, ha, when the hounds came running." Baffled by pear- shaped vowels, he escapes to the set where the old Cagney reasserts itself in two brawls, one in the script, the other extemporaneous.

Ultimately the picture he has acted in sets cinemaddicts atremble, but Terry Rooney has already thought himself a failure, married Rita, and fled to the South Seas. Returning a famous man, he signs a contract obliging him to fake bachelorhood for seven years. The strain tells first on Rita, who returns to Manhattan, second on Terry, who has been linked to Stephanie (Mona Barrie), the studio siren, in publicity gossip. A large plane winging eastward shows Terry on his way back to Rita, the band and Manhattan. Another good man has broken through the lucred shams of Hollywood.

An obvious parallel occurred in the life of Cinemactor Cagney when he quarreled publicly with Warner Brothers in 1936, threatened to give it all up and become a doctor. Now, under Grand National management, free to create new roles, he is still most effective in the kind of thing he used to do. This venture into musical drama demands neither a repeat performance nor condemnation proceedings.

Wife, Doctor and Nurse (Twentieth Century-Fox) is an amazingly fresh version of the triangle indicated in its tired title. That any plot as old as this (most recent prior use: MGM's Between Two Women) can be given a new dress is a minor miracle of screen technique. It has been achieved by application of the dramatic law which holds that any situation becomes new if the characters involved make it inevitable. Steve (Virginia Bruce) never asked herself whether she loved her boss, Dr. Judd Lewis (Warner Baxter) until the day his young wife Ina (Loretta Young) took her to lunch to find out if she did. Deciding that her answer must be yes, Steve walked out. "If I stay," she told the doctor, "I'll lose my sense of humor, the whole thing will end in a mess." The doctor couldn't work without her and became so snappish Ina decided he loved Steve, started for Reno. When, having changed her mind at the airport, she came back and found him drunk in Steve's apartment, Ina throws completely over all the opportunities which actresses have heretofore reaped from this situation. Instead of having a cat fight, the two girls somberly and methodically join forces to get the doctor sober enough to operate.

Excellent is the screenplay (by Lamar Trotti, Darrell Ware and Kathryn Scola) and direction (Walter Lang), but even if it were notable for nothing else. Wife, Doctor and Nurse would make screen history by identifying for the first time the punctilious, intimate manner Warner Baxter has used in all his parts and which appears at last to be the bedside manner of a fashionable surgeon. Good shots: a patient telling Dr. Lewis what she dreams about; an obstetrician getting word his wife has borne a baby; Lewis proposing to Ina while he rips adhesive off her arm; the wedding night bedroom scene played to an obligato of phone calls.

Also Showing

Le Juif Polonais (Franco-American Film). French Actor Harry Baur in a well-worn rococo melodrama, first produced on the Paris stage in 1869.

The Dead March (Imperial Pictures). An anti-war compilation from newsreel libraries, its gruesome shots ranging from 1914 to present-day China, with Radio Commentator Boake Carter growling his sinister comments; not even intended to be entertaining.

Current & Choice

The Life of Emile Zola (Paul Muni, Joseph Schildkraut); The Spanish Earth (Directed by Joris Ivens with commentary by Ernest Hemingway); Souls at Sea (Gary Cooper, George Raft, Frances Dee, Olympe Bradna); Dead End (Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Claire Trevor); The Prisoner of Zenda (Ronald Colman, Raymond Massey, Madeleine Carroll, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.); Shanghai bombing newsreels--Universal, March of Time, News of the Day.

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