The New Pictures

The Wet Parade (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an honest and clever adaptation of Upton Sinclair's sloppy tract on Prohibition (TIME, Sept. 28). Without the radicalism of its original, it delineates the evils of drink and shows, without partiality Wet or Dry, that guzzling to excess brings misery. The heroine (Dorothy Jordan) is the daughter of a charming but besotted Southern gentleman (Lewis Stone). His suicide and the inherited alcoholism of her brother are enough to make her drink shy. She has an even better reason. In Manhattan, where she finds her brother drunk in a hotel, she meets a youth (Robert Young), whose father, like her own, is inebriate. Because of Prohibition, the father (Walter Huston) drinks raw alcohol in large quantities. It drives him so wild that he beats his wife to death. Dorothy Jordan and Robert Young are drawn together by their mutual hate of alcohol. When they marry, Young joins the Federal Prohibition force. He soon learns the futility of his endeavor from a seasoned agent of the law (Jimmy Durante). Gangsters try to kill him. He is saved by Durante at the lamentable expense of Durante's own life. But this is only a minim of catastrophe. The heroine's brother goes blind from poison booze. The hero's father gets life imprisonment for murder.

The Wet Parade is thus a horrid but exciting reprobate's progression, replete with all the disasters that can befall a drunkard as he lurches toward the grave. It is brilliantly acted by a fine cast, coherently constructed and, unlike D. W. Griffith's miserable picture The Struggle, manufactured in the present tense. Good shot: a 'legger's plant in full operation, showing the printing presses for fake labels, the process of dousing whiskey bottles in brine to make them look as though they had come off a boat.

Hotel Continental (Tiffany). Having stumbled upon unity-of-place in Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, cinema producers have been fascinated by it, presumably because it contradicts the prime advantage of their medium--ubiquity. Hotel Continental varies the unity-of-place idea by nearly personifying it. This time the hotel is an old one about to be torn down and the denizens who scamper through its antique corridors are bent on the forlorn gaiety of a farewell party. Mingling with the other guests is a cosmopolitan thief (Theodore Von Eltz) who hopes to retrieve some money which he cached in a fireplace long before. He experiences some trouble getting it because there is a party in the suite where it is hidden and because his accomplice turns out to be a lady member of a rival gang of thieves. She betrays him but regrets it, in time to persuade him to risk a reformation. Produced by a small company with an inexpensive cast, cheap sets and a trick story, the film is fair entertainment and should be even fairer as an investment for its makers. Good shot: a fat person (Bert Roach) softly crying "Help!" as he tries, with two straws, to extricate a cherry from a drink.

Shopworn (Columbia) escapes the danger, in which its plot places it, of being too accurately titled. Reserve in the directing and natural, finished acting, commend it to above-the-average cinemaddicts. Pop Lane and his daughter Kitty (Barbara Stanwyck) live in a construction camp. As pop is dying from injuries received in a dynamite blast, he warns his daughter that life is '"tough," tells her always to "take it on the chin." Kitty spends the remainder of the picture having a good time doing so. She moves from construction camp to college campus, waits on table in a ''hamburger joint" run by her aunt (Zasu Pitts). The love which a personable, curly-thatched student doctor named David (Regis Toomey) bears her is about to turn into matrimony when his doting mother, with the help of a family adviser, tricks him into believing Kitty is unfaithful, carts him off to Europe. Kitty, falsely led to believe that David offered her money to set him free, is left to her own devices, which consist of a season in jail for promiscuity, affairs with many men in many places, a rise to fame as an actress. Now a woman of some importance, she is unrelenting when David returns, until she has given him opportunity to take it on the chin himself. Good shots: close-ups of Miss Stanwyck's feet and legs, first shoddily clad, then more & more expensively covered, walking along boulevards with different men; close-ups of Miss Stanwyck's theatrical luggage, the name Kitty Lane becoming increasingly prominent with each view.

Jean de la Lune (George Marret) is currently the best cinema of French make on view in the U. S. It is the story of a young florist so unsophisticated that U. S. audiences will find it hard to believe him a Parisian. When he marries Marceline, the cast-off mistress of a friend, he takes her sulky neglect as a matter of course, never guesses at her liaisons, cheerfully supports her wastrel brother Clo-Clo. After four years of this. Marceline entrains for Nice with the latest of her lovers. Clo-Clo stays to break the news to Jef.

Here a U. S. cinema plot might have called for a hasty showdown, in which Jef would either forgive his Marceline or, pardonably, shoot her. Director Jean Choux, who wrote the story, avoided such cliches. As the candid husband. Rene Lefebvre has built up a brilliant characterization in comic pathos. He has cheerfully ground coffee at his wife's command, comforted her. unwittingly, when one of her lovers departed for Brazil. He is so helpless, so friendly that Clo-Clo tries to spare his feelings by not telling the bad news. Marceline returns and in the end, so skillfully has incident been used to characterize his charm, that it is climax enough when Jef never learns of her unfaithfulness at all. Good shot: Marceline, leaning from a window of the Riviera express, listening to schoolchildren sing "Jean de la Lune" and remembering her simple-hearted husband.

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