The New Pictures

Possessed (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).

If, as is generally supposed, the cinema has an important influence upon the behavior of cinemaddicts, there will presently be a large increase in the total number of U. S. strumpets. Norma Shearer, Constance Bennett, Elissa Landi, Helen Hayes, Claudette Colbert, Tallulah Bankhead, Evelyn Brent, Greta Garbo, Ruth Chatterton, Marlene Dietrich and Genevieve Tobin have all in recent pictures attractively performed functions ranging from noble prostitution to carefree concupiscence. A Free Soul, Strangers May Kiss, Susan Lenox: Her Fall & Rise, Once a Lady, Morocco, Body & Soul, An American Tragedy, The Sin of Madelon Claudet, My Sin, The Smiling Lieutenant, Born to Love prove that the typical 1931 cinema heroine is a bad example.

Possessed is calculated to have a more disastrous effect than most upon morally malleable persons who witness it. Joan Crawford, again a brunette, impersonates the mistress of a thriving politician (Clark Gable). Rich, wilful and ingratiating, he gives her the trite benefits of illicit love--an apartment with glass doors, a maid-of-all-work, fine clothes, European travel and an education in social politeness. These make an unsophisticated admirer, when they meet again, mistake her for a lady. After three years of pleasurable intimacy, Gable is threatened by a scandal. His mistress has been ennobled by experience and she defends his conduct in an impromptu speech to a political gathering. The speech is so dextrous, so sincere that it prompts cheers and a conclusion in which matrimony is implied.

Clark Gable has now been leading man to each of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's three leading stars. In A Free Soul he delivered a punch to the chin of Cinemactress Shearer; in Susan Lenox he managed to control an impulse to do likewise to Greta Garbo. In this picture, his second with

Miss Crawford, either the restraining influences of the Hays organization or the enervation of Hollywood success affected Clark Gable. In the best scene of the picture, he hits his leading lady with an open hand. Thirty years old, he has had three wives, all older than himself. The present Mrs. Gable, whom he married twice, is 40. Every one knows that he receives more fan letters than any other male actor in Hollywood, smokes a pipe, likes horses, hopes to retire in ten years. He looks a little young for his role in Possessed but he gives a sharp, competent performance.

Surrender (Fox). In Surrender Director William K. Howard takes his camera into a German castle, shows what happened there during the War. The owner, a German count approaching dotage, plays with toy soldiers. The castle is near a prison camp run by a captain who wears a black bandage over one side of his face, who blows his brains out when the War is over. The most pleasant thing that happens is a love affair between a French prisoner (Warner Baxter) and the fiancee of the count's son (Leila Hyams). This nearly turns out badly. Baxter tries to escape and is saved from a firing squad at the last moment. Surrender is an intelligently morbid artifice, occasionally marred by streaks of dull wisecracks.

Rich Man's Folly (Paramount), supposed to have been suggested by Dickens' Dombey & Son, is an earnest but stodgy study of a gloomy man of business (George Bancroft). An irascible and exaggerated enthusiasm for his shipbuilding concern makes him, at first, a monster. He wants nothing but a son to carry on his name and when his wife dies, in furnishing him with one, he shows a callous gratification. The story plods on, a pony with the manners of a percheron, while the son dies (of a cold caught at a ship's christening), while the shipbuilder's neglected daughter marries a minor employe, while the shipbuilder himself marries a precarious blonde and gives her $250,000. The shipbuilder finally has reverses which cause him to become dejectedly deranged. He tries to scuttle one of his own ships, is barely saved from self-destruction. Director John Cromwell has handled the separate episodes in the story ably and George Bancroft scowls in convincing style, but Rich Man's Folly remains an effort rather than an achievement. It never gets under the shipbuilder's thick skin; his follies seem irrational, not tragic. The shipbuilder's son-in-law is Robert Ames, 42, who died suddenly in Manhattan last week, of edema of the brain. He had acted with Ruth Chatterton in Tomorrow & Tomorrow (released next month).

Local Boy Makes Good (First National) is the familiar anecdote* about a bespectacled and dazed collegian who, to his own surprise and the chagrin of his cronies, succeeds in an amorous enterprise.

The collegian is Joe E. Brown, whose strange face, rasping voice and alligator mouth enchant some cinemaddicts, embarrass others.

* On the stage, The Poor Nut.

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