The New Pictures

City Streets (Paramount). Critics may some day, examining the gangster films of 1931, find them significant as perpetuations of a culture which the more self- conscious art-expressions of the day have rejected. For here, in realistic terms, brutalized in content and set going at a breathless pace, are stories and people that are Victor Hugo's stepchildren, many of them highly likeable and articulated with fine ingenuity. In this picture, why does Sylvia Sidney tie her arm in a black sling when her father telephones her to meet him on the corner "if she has to break her arm to get there? She could have hidden the pistol he handed her in her handbag, but instead she hid it in the sling--for romance, for Victor Hugo, immortal originator of gangster fiction. It seems right for her to wear the sling. It seems right that her father, Guy Kibbee, should be a genial, bald-headed Irishman, fond of rococo furniture, comic strips and a pet canary called Jackie. How much more fiendish--because more human--he seems when, going out for the evening's beer-running and murdering, he says mournfully: "Jackie ain't sung a tune all day!"

Other good details--Wynne Gibson shooting "The Big Feller," gang boss, in the back, throwing in the pistol and locking the door of the room in which The Big Feller is alone with Miss Sidney; the derby hat of a murdered beer-runner, with his gilt initials prominent in the crown, floating down a city river; the closing episode in which the gangsters who were going to take Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney for a ride are themselves taken for a ride. The story is made valid by such details and is no less properly in the Hugo tradition if several of its episodes are entirely incredible, the plot tenuous. When the action makes orderly headway it is concerned with the difficulties that oppose the happiness of Miss Sidney and Gary Cooper, who works in a shooting gallery but later becomes a beer runner. Typical shot: Guy Kibbee murdering a friend while he shakes hands with him.

Iron Man (Universal). Lewis ("Lew") Ayres, recently voted "King of the Movies" in a poll conducted by the newspaper with the largest circulation in the U. S.,-- is hopelessly miscast as a light-heavyweight fighter in a fumbled version of W. R. Burnett's novel. The novel is one of the few accurate pieces ever written about the prize ring but it has been adapted in a way that takes the life out of its characterizations, its swift exciting action. Ignoring the actual scenes of ring battles constructed by Author Burnett with so much realism, Director Tod Browning has told the story in spasms of "Oh, yeah?" dialog, within the three walls of various cheap stage sets. The fighter wins his battles so long as he listens to his manager but fails at last because his chorus-girl wife, who is interested in him only for the money he can give her, makes him break with his manager and associate with "a better class of people."

Except when he is trying to be tough, Lew Ayres acts quietly and naturally, but he is not a light-heavyweight, not even a distant likeness of a pugilist: in spite of his efforts to make prominent the muscles of his slender body, greased to show high relief under the lights, one never loses the suspicion that his manager, Robert Arm- strong, an athletic young man who looks something like Jack Sharkey, could slap him over anytime for no purse. Absurdities include a gymnasium shot in which a training fighter swings wildly at his spar- ring partner's chin for several minutes in an effort to knock him out; Armstrong playing solitaire on a table set up on the floor of the gymnasium; fighters wearing their bathrobes on the scales while weigh- ing in; Ayres, after having won a fight, talking into a microphone which is held several feet away from him instead of close to the ropes, against his lips; Ayres wearing a full dress suit in a nightclub, a sartorial liberty which even Gene Tunney in his most precious period never ventured. Only real shots: the fac,ade of Madison Square Garden; some cleverly interposed scenes from actual Garden fights.

Quick Millions (Fox). This is another racketeer picture, with the building racket as background for a fable illuminated by a far more prosaic fancy than City Streets (see above). There are shots of racketeers playing water on cement, blowing up buildings, ruining milk-cans with bullets. The frustrated hero is Spencer Tracy. By blackmailing builders he rises to become the silent partner of a rich building contractor. He tries to cut a figure in society to win the love of his partner's sister. In the end he is shot down by the lowly racketeers whom he has learned to scorn. In spite of an able cast that includes Marguerite Churchill and Sally Eilers, the whole thing is dull, chiefly because of an incoherence brought on by bad dialog and an attempt to cover too much action in program time. Typical shot: Spencer Tracy and his gang starting out in silk hats and morning suits to kidnap a bride.

*The tabloid New York Dally News (1,330,000).

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