The New Pictures

Swing Your Lady (Warner Bros.). When Ed (Humphrey Bogart) and his assistant Popeye (Frank McHugh) wanted to keep their wrestler Joe Skopapolous (Nat Pendleton) from finding out what they were talking about, all they had to do was spell the words. Joe knew that he was matched to wrestle a blacksmith in Plunket, Mo. on Decoration Day. What he did not know was that the blacksmith was a dame (Louise Fazenda). Out skipping rope, Joe met Sadie, paid her the sincerest tribute womanhood could inspire in him: "You're sure a big one all right."

At the rehearsal for the bout, love-smitten Joe, teaching Sadie a hammer lock, suddenly pressed his lips to hers, refused to go on with the match. Manager Ed was desperate till Noah (Daniel Boone Savage), Sadie's discarded hillbilly swain, started taking pot shots at the troupe with a squirrel gun. Bearded Noah leaped at a chance to crush Joe's bones in public, winner take Sadie. Ed sent Joe in to lose, reversed his instructions halfway through the match when Madison Square Garden wired an offer. But when the troupe left, Loser Noah was Garden-bound, Winner Joe happy in the blacksmith shop with his admiring prize.

Tarzan's Revenge (Twentieth Century-Fox). Mrs. Eleanor Holm Jarrett, champion backstroke swimmer,* is the current cinemate of a new and mightily thoracic Tarzan, blending with his eerie ee-ya-ee call the chewing-gum flavor of her pronounced Brooklyn accent. This new Tarzan is lean, 6-ft. 2-in., Olympic Champion Glenn Morris, summoned to the role to replace Johnny Weissmuller. Actor Morris, who heroically combines the facial qualities of Broadway's Burgess Meredith and Hollywood's Harpo Marx, has the miming ability of neither. What he has is the 1936 Olympic decathlon title. His costume: no leopard skin, but a serviceable breechclout, a knife at the hip.

Eleanor is on safari in the jungle country with her father (George Barbier), her mother (Hedda Hopper) and her fiance (George Meeker). A swarthy turbaned nabob named Ben Alleu Bey (C. Henry Gordon), who keeps 100 wives in,a jungle palace, marks her for 101. But he reckons without Glenn Morris.

Eleanor meets Tarzan and his chimpanzee chum when they rescue her from a tumble into a morass. When he places an amoral hand on her thigh, she socks him, he socks her back into the muck, swings off into the tangled forest. On his next visit he fights off an enraged lioness, but when he zips back into his trees, nobody will believe Eleanor's story. Then one day Eleanor, clad in a neat white jumper suit, strolls into the bush. Tarzan snatches her away to his eyrie. On the bank of his jungle swimming hole Tarzan makes funny motions, meaning "Can you swim?" Yes, Mrs. Jarrett can swim. Off comes the jumper, revealing a natty white swimsuit (see cut) and in she dives.

Best lines: Eleanor, welcomed by the nabob with punctilious honors, rejoining with full Flatbush skepticism: "Wuss this alia bout?"

Typical shots: Tarzan nuzzling contentedly with his lithely amphibian mate in their rock-bound swimming pool, undulating into an underwater kiss for a fadeout. Best all-round performer: Cheetah, the Chimp.

The Buccaneer (Paramount). On Jan. 8, 1815, "Old Hickory" Jackson and his ragged army, immeasurably aided by the patch-eyed, earringed corsairs of Pirate Jean Lafitte, turned back the British at New Orleans in an extra-inning battle of the War of 1812. Last week, on the eve of the 123rd anniversary of that battle, Hollywood Producer Cecil Blount De Mille carted his motion picture about Pirate-Patriot Lafitte, General Jackson, and the robust bandits of old Barataria in the bayous to New Orleans' Saenger Theatre for its world premiere.

Those who managed to crowd into the theatre got a much better view of the battle than any of their ancestors did, and it was probably a better battle, too, since the War of 1812 had no De Mille to stage it. Further than that, the spectators got a reassuringly noble portrayal of the scoundrelly Lafitte from Fredric March, a Jackson as authentic as a $20 bill in the person of Hugh Sothern, and a cinema view of Lafitte's bayou stronghold south of New Orleans that was as like the original as Hollywood could devise.

History, up against Cecil B. De Mille, has usually come out second best. But through the flapping folds of intermittent Old Glorys and Jolly Rogers, his cinema story of Jean Lafitte fits the record accurately enough. Of the trademarked De Mille technique--oceans of upturned faces, far-flung spectacles--there are few traces. Instead there is a newer tendency to imply mass movement by significant segments--a dozen or so of Barataria's tatterdemillians furiously paddling pi-rogues out of the swampy bayous: the Battle of New Orleans viewed mostly from somewhere above and to the left of Lafitte's swart, mustachioed cannoneer, Dominique You (Akim Tamiroff), and his treasured cast-iron cannon, "Betsy."

In Old Chicago (Twentieth Century-Fox) increases by leaps and bounds the U. S. debt to Mrs. O'Leary's cataclysmic cow, Daisy, whom legend credits with hav-ing kicked over a lantern to start the fire that laid waste the sprawling, rickety Chicago of 1871, thus clearing the ground for a grander city.* For 25 blistering, earsplitting, harrowing minutes (outlasting by five minutes the stunning fury of Samuel Goldwyn's Hurricane), a terrifically realistic re-creation of the historic $200,000,000 holocaust flares from the screen, wiping out Darryl Zanuck's studio-made Chicago and impressions of most other screen catastrophes as well.

But before this staged conflagration sweeps the picture on to its fiery finish, a clever, comprehensive feat of screen writing has caught the lusty spirit of young Chicago. Producer Zanuck had the idea for a Chicago fire picture for sometime, probably dating from MGM's earthshaking San Francisco. A screen story by Niven Busch, originally titled We, the O'Leary's was just what he wanted. Cinmauthor Busch had not only accepted the legend of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, he had converted it into a saga. Adapted by Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levien. it fit the cinema pattern for romanticized history like a glove.

In the hoydenish city of fancy, flouncy ladies, sporting gents, muddy boulevards, the Widow O'Leary (Alice Brady) settles her brood in the pine-shantied "Patch," takes in washing, raises her boys, accumulates hard-earned comfort and Daisy, the cow. That Daisy's right hind hoof packs a punch that will bear watching is evident when she kicks young Bob (Tom Brown) into the arms of Gretchen, the house girl (June Storey), to settle the future of the youngest O'Leary. The eldest. Jack (Don Ameche), becomes a lawyer with lofty principles, low income. Dion (Tyrone Power), heir to the blarneying ways of his late father, opens a gilded saloon, maneuvers away from Political Boss Gil Warren (Brian Donlevy) his treacle-toned lady, Belle Fawcett (Alice Faye), and his control of votes in the Patch. When these votes elect honest Brother Jack mayor, Dion expects to have things all his own way. Just after he discovers that Jack is a seagreen incorruptible, Daisy kicks the lantern over.

Best shots: the terror-stricken refugees pouring out of street ends into the haven of the Chicago River, while the whole city flames up behind them; the bawling steers in the stockyard pens, bursting through the flimsy fencing, stampeding through the streets and trampling the screen life out of Villain Brian Donlevy.

To many who had forgotten--thanks to the series of superficial cinema roles that have enveloped her--how sound an actress Alice Brady is, her warming, plainspoken, broguish portrayal of the Widow O'Leary was a revelation. By long odds the most convincing performer in In Old Chicago, she makes handsome Tyrone Power seem something of a pip-squeak as Chicago's boss, reduces the whole caboodle of headlined stars to the ranks of supporting players.

-Dropped from U. S. Olympic team for breaking training rules on the way to the 1936 Olympic Games, she made $30,000 swimming in Showman Billy Rose's Cleveland Exposition last summer. In November she and Rose said they would marry as soon as they could get divorces, she from Crooner Art Jarrett, he from Comedienne Fanny Brice. Of diminutive, 36-year-old Billy, said Eleanor: "He's got everything Robert Taylor has."

-The legend was created by the late Chicago Newshawk Michael Ahern and associates. Nobody knows the real cause of the Chicago fire.

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