The New Pictures

Pinocchio (Disney-RKO) is the world's third full-length cartoon movie.* It is Disney's second, and in every respect except its score his best. In craftsmanship and delicacy of drawing and coloring, in the articulation of its dozens of characters, in the greater variety and depth of its photographic effects, it tops the high standard Snow White set. The charm, humor and loving care with which it treats its inanimate characters puts it in a class by itself.

Since the Disney studio works as a collective enterprise (1,200 people worked two years to produce Pinocchio), it is difficult to evaluate Walt Disney's exact share in the picture. Disney himself always says "we" instead of "I" in talking about his productions. But the producer's hand is apparent in Cleo, the coyly diaphanous goldfish; in the fluffy antics of Figaro, the kitten; above all in the creation of Jiminy Cricket.

Like Carlo Collodi's children's classic, the picture is a morality tale. Kindly old Wood Carver Geppetto carves a puppet so lifelike that he is given life. But before the live puppet can become a boy he must become truthful, courageous, unselfish. His one constant companion in the adventures that test the little puppet is Jiminy Cricket, his conscience, "that still, small voice that nobody listens to." This worldly but goodhearted little insect, topped by a grey topper and swinging an umbrella ("a genuine Chamberlain" which he sometimes uses for a parachute), comes to work late the very first day, fails Pinocchio when he needs his conscience most, despairs when Pinocchio despairs, is chirpingly cheerful when the puppet is. He is a fresh little fellow, too, who always calls Pinocchio "Pinoak," yells, "Break it up, boys," to the marine life that gets under his feet. When Monstro the Whale sneezes catastrophically, Jiminy says: "Gesundheit." Most people will call Jiminy Cricket the most human character in Pinocchio and Disney's best inspiration. Grimmest inspiration is Pleasure Island, where little boys turn into asses. Not the moral, but the one vulgarly realistic false note, will scare the wits out of little boys and girls, too.

In cartooning, technique is almost as important as inspiration. Articulation in Pinocchio is much better than in Snow White, and the animals are better articulated than the human characters.

And technique has added one new effect to Pinocchio that Snow White did not have--terror. The peeping eyes in the night scenes in Snow White were scary, the beautifully drawn buzzards (of which Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art now owns one sketch) were ghoulish. But in Pinocchio the plunging, charging whale, Monstro, is terrifying.

Nor are there any characters in Snow White to compare with J. Worthington Foulfellow, the actor-fox, who sells Pinocchio to the puppet show, or his shabby, screwloose, unscrupulous companion, Giddy, the cat. In satirizing this pair of ham actors, Disney is working on a new plane. This is no longer the playful caricaturing of old Wood Carver Geppetto, the frolicsome kitten or Jiminy Cricket. Foulfellow and Giddy are savage adult satire. They are even out of place in a children's picture. But they suggest the direction Disney may take if he ever makes a greater picture than Pinocchio.

My Little Chickadee (Universal) is an inspired coupling of the suggestive art of America's leading mental stripteaser (Mae West) with the comic talents of one of the funniest men on earth (W. C. Fields). Together they make a comedy which is more hilarious than its grab-bag plot about a fancy lady, whose efforts to roll a penniless hair-oil salesman are insufficiently supported by good gags, has any right to be. It also suffers less than usual from the tendency of Comedienne West (who yearns to play Catherine the Great) to take herself too seriously.

As highly staminate Flower Belle, Mae West spreads her gorgeous corolla (including a butterfly bow that coyly punctuates her posterior rhythms) in Greasewood City, one of the West's wide-open places. There she gets mixed up with a Masked Bandit, who turns out to be Joseph Calleia disguised as a cagoulard. Flower Belle's throaty account of their first meeting: "I was in a tight spot, but I managed to wiggle out of it." She also fakes a marriage with Cuthbert J. Twillie (W. C. Fields) because she thinks his bag of fake money is real, substitutes a goat for herself in the nuptial chamber when she finds it isn't.

Not quite the box-office come-on she used to be, Miss West implements this return to her spiritual home in the gamy 'gos with the expert services of Director Edward F. Cline, the ex-Keystone Cop, who invented Bathing Beauties, and Producer Lester Cowan, who taught Hollywood (with You Can't Cheat an Honest Man) that Comedian Fields is at his best when he is playing Comedian Fields.

Cuthbert J. Twillie is first-rate W. C. Fields' clowning, which is proof enough that one of the coolest heads in show business surmounts Cinemactress West's opulent curves. For Mae, who fancies herself no end as a literatus and has always jealously insisted on authoring her own scripts, this time took a tip from Producer Cowan. She let Funnyman Fields write in his own part, ad lib to his heart's content. Best ad lib was carefully excised from the picture. Murmured Fields one day to the goat which he mistakes for Flower Belle: "Darling, have you changed your perfume?"

-- No. 1, Disney's Snow White; No. 2, Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels.

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