The New Pictures

The Perfect Specimen (Warner Bros.) experiments with the solemn hypothesis that a boy may be nurtured to-all-round perfection in a sort of social vacuum; but that when he is tested against assorted worldliness he will relapse into human frailty. Irish Cinemactor Errol Flynn, a godlike young man of limited acting ability, performs the title role, and in demonstrating his perfection is at one point required to take most of his clothes off.* In this picture he labors under the screen name of Gerald Beresford Wicks, who has been schooled in all the arts and sciences by a bossy grandmother (May Robson), to fit him for the Wicks fame & fortune. His planned life gets out of hand when Mona Carter (Joan Blondell) crashes her car through the Wickstead fence, discovers the perfect specimen testing a Newtonian theory by falling out of a tree. With very little urging, Gerald reacts like a perfectly normal and admirably coordinated human. He pursues Mona, impresses her by flattening a tough guy (Allen Jenkins), wins another bout at a truck drivers' picnic, goes to work as a mechanic, conducts a merry courtship while Grandma Wicks and the nation's police beat the bushes for him. Set-tos with such surrealities as mad Poet Killigrew Shawe (Hugh Herbert) and the truckmen give Gerald's education the final polish. He goes home, gives tyrannical Grandma Wicks a piece of his mind, decides that Mona knows best.

The Great Garrick (Warner Bros.). As different from the cinema's typical period romance as champagne from sack, Ernest Vajda's figmentary episode in the life of 18th Century Play Actor David Garrick fits the Hollywood gag into the elaborate frame of Georgian humor. Garrick, who played Macbeth in the uniform of a Hanoverian general, might have enjoyed this modernization. He probably would have chuckled at his 1937 impersonator, debonair, English Brian Aherne, stealing scenes from noted Scene-Stealer Edward Everett Horton, but would certainly have advised some rewriting in the interest of pace.

The Vajda story has Garrick invited to Paris to appear with the Comedie Franc,aise in 1750. Preceding him there flies the rumor that he is coming over to teach the Frenchmen how to act. The angered members of the French company prepare an extravagant hoax, take over an inn Garrick must stop at en route, man it with players from their troupe. Plan is to give Garrick an alarmingly warm welcome. Tipped off, Garrick and his man Tubby (E. E. Horton) affect serene indifference to the staged hubbub.

When a frightened young woman (Olivia de Havilland) arrives with a fluttery story about a wrecked coach, Garrick accepts her as part of the plot, grandly surrenders his rooms to her. While he feigns concern for her safety and distress during the continued ructions, he decides she is a very bad actress. Later he tells her so, then beats the French at their own game, by impersonating one of their members. When he reveals himself there are mutual apologies and gallant toasts all round; but the girl has fled. In Paris he looks for her backstage, discovers that, sure enough, she was no actress at all.

All Baba Goes to Town (Twentieth Century-Fox) transports taw-eyed, prancing little Eddie Cantor to ancient Bagdad, where he physics the ailing realm of Sultan Roland Young with panaceas borrowed from the New Deal. Haroun-al-Cantor's venture into political satire is tuneful, gay, imaginatively written, generously produced. The cumulative effect of its guying would not nettle even the income tax bureau, for Funnyman Cantor pokes lightly at an array of straw men.

The authors (Gene Towne, Graham Baker, Gene Fowler), borrowing the Connecticut Yankee formula, have brought it aptly up to date. Cantor is a star-struck autograph hunter on his way to Hollywood for a rubberneck vacation among the famous faces. He stumbles on the desert location of a cinema company making an episode from the Arabian Nights, becomes an extra, falls asleep in the jar reserved for Ali Baba.

His dream takes him to old Bagdad, where he is received by the Sultan and Sultana (former Strip-Teaser Gypsy Rose Lee). Eddie earns the gratitude of the harassed Sultan by setting up a New Deal, with himself as Prime Minister. Some of his projects: improved breadlines (one for rye, one for whole-wheat), a tax on wives, bridges for riverless Bagdad* (the rivers to be dug later), dancing lessons for the masses, filling stations for camels.

When things have come to such a pass that the Sultan turns commoner and runs for president, Eddie to his horror is made a write-in opposition candidate, campaigns against himself to no effect: he sweeps the country except for the outlying provinces of Maino and Vermontash. The nine old councilors declare the election unconstitutional, and Eddie leaves town on a magic carpet, which he controls by a cantrip--"inflation" to go up, ''deflation" to come down. Eventually the carpet burns away from under him,* and he comes to earth with a thud, wakes to find himself in Hollywood, goggling at the passing stars.

Cantor joined Twentieth Century-Fox in September 1936 under a three-picture arrangement for a reputed $1,000,000, after having spent the previous seven years with Samuel Goldwyn and United Artists. He bought his release from the Goldwyn contract when Goldwyn failed to buy Three Men on a Horse for him. AH Baba Goes to Town is his first film under the Twentieth Century-Fox agreement.

Live, Love and Learn (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) sends Robert Montgomery forth from a whimsical, penniless life in Manhattan's Washington Square section into battle against the stultifying wiles of Mammon. He is armed with artistic genius that "has something ostentatiously quiet about it," a facility with yellows unequaled since van Gogh and a respectable capacity for liquor. Mammon showers him with gold, distracts him with a nasty number named Lily, wins him from his garret with commissions to paint a portrait of Mrs. Colfax-Baxter, a study in oils of Mr. Palmiston's Derby winner, Blue Bolt. When wife (Rosalind Russell) and crony (Robert Benchley) walk out on him, taking much of life's beauty and all of its humor back to Washington Square, Painter Montgomery hits the skids. Near bottom his eye lights on a ghetto lad selling flowers. He collars him, explains to the boy's dubious mother that he wants to paint the lad. Says she: ''What color?" From then on Mammon begins losing rounds. The escapade winds up with reconciled principals pushing puffy Mr. Palmiston through the portrait of Blue Bolt.

The Awful Truth (Columbia). Resourceful, humorous Director Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap, The Milky Way, Make Way For Tomorrow) takes a couple of derby hats, an ingratiating wire-haired fox terrier and three players without any special reputations as comedians, and spins a brightly-written Vina Delmar script into the gayest screen comedy the season has seen. In the process he establishes Irene Dunne as one of the top comediennes of current cinema, keeps Columbia's reputation for mature comedy (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Theodora Goes Wild) at its brightest. He also has his say on divorce, the double standard.

The urbane Warriners are on the verge of divorce because Jerry (Gary Grant) suspects that Lucy (Irene Dunne) has been carrying on with her music teacher and because Jerry came back from an alleged trip to Florida with a basket of California oranges. The decree, to become final in 90 days, grants Lucy custody of shaggy Mr. Smith (Asta of The Thin Man), allows Jerry occasional visits with the pup.

From this beginning, Director McCarey accelerates the comic pace, shows Lucy trying lamely but gamely to follow her new-found Oklahoma hearty (Ralph Bellamy) through the intricacies of "truckin'," singing prairie ballads in duo with him, listening to his tender homespun verse, with Jerry an amused and disturbing audience. As Lucy's life becomes more madly muddled, with three men complicating it, the comedy turns slapstick. High spots are Jerry's discomfiting brush with jujitsu at the expert hands of the singing teacher's Japanese houseboy, the free-for-all that follows Mr. Smith's canine persistence in playing go-find with two shriekingly circumstantial derby hats in Lucy's apartment. From this climax, when all Lucy's indiscretions are aired for the helpless mischances they really are, the rest is gay downgrade. Lucy commits delirious gaucheries in a Park Avenue drawing room to free Jerry from an entangling alliance, contrives a sprightly midnight reconciliation that must have given the Hays office a bad ten minutes.

Irene Dunne, who stepped from opera and musical leads (Show Boat) to cinema character roles that carried her from youth to grey old age (Cimarron, Show Boat), put her foot down last year, demanded comedy. Her astonishing hoe-down interlude in Show Boat indicated her aptitude for lighter things. Theodora Goes Wild gave her the first full-length try. The Awful Truth establishes her with her peers, Claudette Colbert and Jean Arthur.

*While touring the Spanish front last spring, Actor Flynn was reported wounded by a machine-gun bullet. Prosaic truth was that he was hit on the head by falling plaster, knocked unconscious for four hours. Warner Brothers, piqued at the press reports, threatened to assign Actor Flynn a public relations counselor. *The real Bagdad is on the famed Tigris River. *While the picture was in making last August, the magic carpet fell with a vengeance, killing two workmen, injuring two others (TIME, Sept. 6).

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