The New Pictures

Superman in the Volcano (Paramount] is the Man of Steel's eighth cinemappearance since the movies muscled in on his vast newspaper-magazine-radio audience (estimate: 50,000,000) last September. The picture also highlights a new U.S. cinema fashion: some 20,000.000 Supermaniacs can hardly wait for Superman's ten-minute, one-reel cartoon to appear once a month in more than 7,000 U.S. movie houses.

Supermania is the only word for their devotion to this irrepressible Citizen Fixit, who smacks death rays back into the cannon, restores toppling skyscrapers to their foundations, knits broken bridges together with his bare hands, and who has brought a new cry into the world: "It's a bird! It's a plane! It's--SUPERMAN!"

Artistically, Superman shorts are the movie cartoon at its worst. Superman looks and acts like a wooden puppet. So do all his playmates. There is little that his creators--the old Fleischer Studios (now Famous Studios, Inc.) at Miami, Fla.--can do to improve their hero--even King Disney can't animate human beings satisfactorily. But they did manage to give him a new voice recently. His old one wasn't manly enough. Now it booms.

Superman in the Volcano shows the wonderworker rescuing his newshen pal, Lois, from a belching crater, splicing a broken power line with uninsulated hands, blowing a sluice in the mountain so that a lava flow will miss the metropolis. There is never any suspense, since Superman always wins, no matter what happens. But his idolators (of all ages) seem satisfied to see him flex his muscles. This vicarious satisfaction has made Superman Paramount's most popular and profitable short, despite the $65,000 it costs to make each cartoon. So popular is the muscular moron that 114 female artists at the Famous studio recently answered a questionnaire asking whether they would prefer Superman for a husband or a boy friend. All said: boy friend. Explained one: "Trying to live with so super a husband might be awfully fatiguing."

It Happened in Flatbush (20th Century-Fox) immortalizes the Brooklyn Dodgers (who won the National League pennant last season after 21 years of trying). The picture celebrates the travails and triumphs of a hammy Brooklyn baseball team, the civic and athletic regeneration of its manager, "Butterfingers" Maguire (Lloyd Nolan). The inspiration is authentic, but the film fumbles the atmosphere, fails to capture the special cachet of Brooklyn and "dem bums."

Right out of the artless Dodger tradition is the resolve of the movie baseball team's matronly owner (Sara Allgood) to bring Butterfingers back to manage her perennial losers. One of Butterfingers' previous boggles had lost the team a pennant, earned him a seven-year banishment from Brooklyn.

When Owner Allgood dies, Butterfingers cinches the pennant by wooing funds for new players from the svelte new socialite owner (Carole Landis). Soon it is clear that he is also about to cinch Owner Landis. Romance for Butterfingers lies just beyond the bleachers.

Good sequence: A stubborn ball fan (Matt McHugh) faces assault & battery charges for socking an umpire. He is defended by Butterfingers, who patiently tells the court that the Brooklynite feels that he can never become a part of the U.S. until his team wins a pennant, that he therefore views the umpire not as a man, but as an enemy of the community. The understanding court levies a small fine.

I Married An Angel (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) vigorously rubs the bloom from the wings of the brisk, fresh, imaginative musical that ran on Broadway four years ago. Then it had bounce, charm, a good Rodgers & Hart score, and the electric presence of grave, ashen, graceful Vera Zorina, every man's idea of a down-to-earth angel. M.G.M.'s cineversion has the R. & H. melodies (ponderously played), Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, and a fantastically mutilated plot.

Most of Hollywood's Angel transpires in the dreamworld of dimpled, operatic Nelson Eddy. As Budapest's jaded Count Willy Palaffi, Eddy falls asleep vowing he will marry nothing less than an angel. Obligingly, M.G.M. sends him Jeanette MacDonald (complete with wings). Since not even camera magic can etherealize perdurable Angel MacDonald, this is one dream to stump Freud--especially when DreamerEddy takes his Angel for a dream honeymoon in Paris.

It is seven long years since Soprano MacDonald and Baritone Eddy made a ten-strike with Victor Herbert's sure-fire romantic operetta, Naughty Marietta. I Married An Angel, which is not equipped with the kind of songs (Spring Is Here, I Married An Angel) they can sing, is their eighth picture together. It may well be their last--unless M.G.M. renews green-eyed Songbird MacDonald's golden contract.

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