The New Pictures

Viennese Nights (Warner). On every costume plate and scene design used in making Viennese Nights appeared the work "Oksroh"--a word meaning that the article on which it was placed had been approved by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein, authors of the story and the music. Although this kind of supervision--a reaction from a period when the cinema was condemned for giving authors nothing to say at all--is merely a mannerism of the studio, the picture is satisfactory. It succeeds principally because of its music, on which Romberg and Hammerstein did not have to pass judgment since they had created it. Audiences will hum "In Vienna" and "We Make a Happy Pair." The story, full of reminiscences of three generations of operetta, is concerned with a cobbler's daughter who has two military lovers--a lieutenant and a drummer. Silliest idea: Vivienne Segal's frustrated love for the drummer reborn in her grandchild who falls in love with the drummer's grandchild who has made symphonic arrangements out of his grandfather's songs.

Just Imagine (Fox). In 1980, food will be pills; wives will be given out by the State; airplanes will have supplanted automobiles; skyscrapers will be 100 stories high; people will have numbers instead of names; television will make tom-peeping completely, universally possible; any mention of the prim old-fashioned girls of 1930 will be regarded as funny. In 1980, however, musical comedies will still be full of jokes that have been doing service for years; songs will not have improved; heroines will be coy and leading men pompous. These suggestions spectators will absorb from De Sylva, Brown & Henderson's mechanically amusing musi-comedy. A theme which has been useful to H. G. Wells and Jules Verne they have executed in the fantasies of a tired vaudeville booking-agent. Just Imagine is much too long, and in spite of all that Marjorie White and John Garrick can do, it is boring. Best sequence: the trip to Mars in a vast airplane, with Comedian El Brendel as stowaway.

Derelict (Paramount). George Bancroft and that William Boyd who, to distinguish him from another star of the same name, is generally referred to as "the incomparable Sergeant Quirt in the stage version of What Price Glory," fight each other in many seaports and on ships for the favors of Jessie Royce Landis. They are first mates on boats of the. same line. Bancroft is the first mate who really loves the girl. Boyd is the nasty first mate. The melodramatic episodes arranged for them are well directed and plausible for this kind of thing. Best shot: a storm at sea. with tons of water hitting a ship in a way which, for the first time in pictures, will give inland audiences an idea of what a sea storm is like.

After a little while at Tome School and at Annapolis where he stroked his class crew, George Bancroft became an actor. Like other actors from the East, he went into pictures to play western villains. In Driven he was billed as The Smiling Villain. Smiling villainy became his specialty. When Underworld set box-office records and a fashion for crook stories, he was made a star. Looking younger than his age (43) he earns about $5,000 per week, takes a swim every day, has a mild aptitude for humorous anecdotes which he acts out gravely as he goes along. Last spring he was implicated in a charge of breaking the jaw of one Rutger Bleecker Jr. It was rumored that when patrons of a roadhouse were praising Bancroft, Bleecker, small but unabashed, strode to his table, said: "Personally, I think you're lousy." The case was dismissed.

Min and Bill (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This is better than most program pictures because it does not fit completely into any standard classifications. It is not a melodrama or a farce, but something between. Marie Dressier as proprietress of a boarding house on the wharfs, Wallace Beery as her star boarder and sweetheart, have some good lines. Sometimes they act competently and sometimes they burlesque with unconscious ludicrousness; particularly Miss Dressier who, made a star because of the extravagant praise given her for her work in bit-parts (TIME, July 28), has now kept on making bit-parts out of roles in which she was supposed to star. How well Min and Bill will register in its present form remains questionable, although it is fortified by long sequences of slapstick such as a six-minute fight in which Min hits Bill with a variety of objects, including porcelain bedroom utensils. Best acting: Dorothy Jordan as the girl whom Miss Dressier has taken care of since her mother, a prostitute in the next town, left her in the boarding house.

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