The New Pictures

Heidi (Twentieth Century-Fox). The story was published in Germany in 1881, and translations began to appear soon after. Ever since then English, German, Italian, Russian, Austrian, French, Swiss, U. S. and Scandinavian children have kept Heidi a bestseller. Like all Shirley Temple stories, Heidi traces the reaction of human wickedness to the Temple dimples; unlike many of them, it has a craftsmanlike dramatic structure.

Aunt Dete (Mady Christians) took Heidi to the Alpine hut of Grandfather Adolph Kramer (Jean Hersholt) because she was tired of looking after her. Grandpa Kramer, a recluse, had not spoken to anybody for years, but Heidi soon made a playmate of him. It was terrible when Aunt Dete stole her one day, took her to Frankfurt to live in rich Herr Sesemann's house. After the snow and goats it was dismal doing lessons with invalid Klara Sesemann. (Marcia Mae Jones). Klara's mean governess, pointing her starchy cap at Sesemann, wanted Klara to stay sick, but Heidi's Christmas present to Herr Sesemann was the sight of Klara walking. The climax of the story concerns the somewhat frenzied efforts of Grandfather Kramer to get Heidi back, while the governess is trying to sell her to the gypsies. Since no Temple picture is complete without one of the star's famed dances, a production number is cued in by dissolving through the page of a child's story book to Shirley doing a Holland Dutch routine in wooden shoes, then a minuet in 18th Century costume.

Double Wedding (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Early in the proceedings Charlie Lodge (William Powell) analyzes himself for the benefit of audience and Margit Agnew (Myrna Loy): "I'll be quite frank with you. I suppose I'm what you'd call a cad." Besides a cad, one learns that he is an ex-Foreign Legionnaire, an ex-Paris tourist guide, an ex-husband, a part-time painter, a would-be cinema director. He lives in a trailer on a vacant lot next to a buffet known as Spike's Place. Spike (Edgar Kennedy) calls him to the telephone by firing an air rifle at a gong hung in the trailer window. His connection with Margit, until they make a deal, is limited to a friendship with her Bohemian sister Irene (Florence Rice) and the latter's gentlemanly fiance Waldo (John Beal).

Margit is not a bit like Charlie. In her well-appointed home all menus are typewritten. Eggs are boiled in electrical gadgets to insure correct timing, the gardener waters the lawn when the paper says the weather will be good, even if he has to do it in the pouring rain. Margit runs a gown-shop and the lives of everyone around her. She only makes a deal with Charlie Lodge to keep him from splitting, caddishly, Irene and Waldo. The deal is that if he stops fascinating Irene, Margit will pose for her portrait--for three weeks.

Brilliantly adapted by Jo Swerling from a play by Ferenc Molnar, played up to the hubcaps by cinema's most famed comedy couple and high-class supporters, Double Wedding is a 100% sample of the haywire school. Its only flaw is that, with Hollywood's destructive knack for stylizing all its gestures, the technique of haywire comedy has reached a monotonous perfection. After two screwy characters have been established as potential sweethearts and their lives thoroughly scrambled with another couple's, the main element of suspense is what kind of melee the plot can wind up to. In Double Wedding the melee is Charlie's wedding to Irene, staged in his trailer home, which turns into a wedding to Margit.

Club de Femmes (Jacques Deval), made in France, is a naive, sometimes sad, sometimes merry, typically Gallic approach to a theme similar to that of Maedchen in Uniform, Eight Girls in a Boat and other film treatments of repressed girlhood. Manhattan censors promptly spotted Sapphic overtones and more frankness than young girls ought,to show, ordered several cuts. Its U. S. sponsors, Arthur Mayer and Joseph Burstyn, gloomily anticipated even severer censorship in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas.

Playwright Jacques Deval (Tovarich, Mademoiselle, Her Cardboard Lover), author and director, sets his scene in a Parisian girls' club whose portals no man may pass--officially. Of course one manages to slip in, thus providing a thread to the tale and bringing pretty Danielle Darrieux (this time, in contrast to her star-crossed Marie Vetsera in Mayerling, a lively minx) a climax of illicit motherhood. Manhattan censors ordered an English subtitle indicating that Danielle and her young man (Raymond Gall) have been secretly married all along.

Censors were troubled, too, over the activities of a procuress (Junie Astor) who conducts her activities from the switchboard of the club. They finally suffered her to remain, after carefully editing the careers of the two girls she ensnares. The Sapphic inferences were noted in the character played by beauteous Else Argall, Author Deval's wife and a newcomer to cinema. Censorship deleted her best scene, which shows her successfully fighting the urge to join the girl of her desire. Considered fit for Manhattan cinemagoers was the shot in which she poisons the procuress-telephone operator. Playwright-Director Deval was in Manhattan last week with the script of a new play, Soubrette, seeking a producer and planning on Actress-Wife Argall for the lead.

Best (censored) shot: One of the girls limed by the procuress trying frantically to wash the stain out of her soul in the shower bath.

Gayest (uncensored) shot: all the girls of the club gathered in and around the swimming pool, knitting tiny garments for Danielle's expected baby.

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