The New Pictures

Sinners in the Sun (Paramount) is a poor man's story of the wages of luxurious sin. But the picture gets stuck in the advertising sections of the fashion magazines. It is loaded with women's underclothing, bathing suits, furs, jewels, unbricked champagne, custombuilt limousines--all with an air of cheap display. Carole Lombard is a model in a couturier's, Chester Morris a garage mechanic. Depression keeps them from marrying. Never forgetting each other, they drift toward becoming, respectively, a rich man's whim and a rich woman's whim. They whim along hysterically, in ballrooms and gambling palaces, trying to forget, failing to rise to the top of! their new professions. At length they meet and call names, but no short ugly ones. At last the double standard begins to operate. In order to get clean, it seems necessary for Carole Lombard to work in a sweatshop, but Chester Morris is allowed to rise a little above a garage mechanic before he meets Carole's clean eyes with clean eyes of his own.

When A Feller Needs A Friend (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a medium of self-expression for Jackie Cooper and Chic Sale. It has a horsecar for laughs and a cripple boy for tears. Jackie is coddled by his parents but Uncle Jonas (Chic Sale) makes a little man of him by teaching him to fish and fight. Fishing, he cheerfully falls into the water. Fighting, he tearfully loses his first few bouts. Chic Sale loses his horsecar job for letting Jackie drive and is on his way to the poor-farm. Tragedy stalks the pair. But Jackie wins a bout, saves Chic Sale from the poor-farm, everything is going to be all right.

Congress Dances (Eric Pommer) is a lyrical fantasy of good clean fun at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15). Rated a 1932 top in cinema technique by European audiences and critics, it strikes U. S. observers as well done but not epochal. The production is German, the characters speak English. Bilingual Lilian Harvey is a little Viennese shopgirl who throws advertisement bouquets into the carriages of the arriving princes until her bouquet for handsome Tsar Alexander of Russia (Henry Garat) is taken for a bomb. The police save her from lynching, the Tsar saves her from a police whipping and installs her in a palatial lovenest. Then the romance theme is dropped. Instead, a duel of wits between Prince Metternich of Austria (Conrad Veidt) and the Tsar is vaguely indicated. Super-urbane Metternich, an affable young spider who is playing on his own home grounds, eavesdrops, bamboozles the sub-urbane diplomats, tries to keep the Tsar away from the Congress. The Tsar counter-bamboozles by substituting a facsimile Tsar whenever he is expected to fall into one of Metternich's traps. The Congress of bemedaled clotheshorses goes to Met-ternich's grand ball. Metternich finishes the business of the Congress alone.

Romance returns to the shopgirl and the Tsar. It is all sustained in a key of unreality: Metternich's plotting, the shop-girl's dreams, the Tsar's philanderings. At the end this landscape in a bottle is shattered with the news that Napoleon has escaped from Elba, the satire returns to reality.--

Congress Dances is a new cinemusical type, noteworthy for its formality, charm, wit and innocence. It accents spectacle and pace, largely ignores plot implications. Conrad Veidt, an expert in menace parts who resembles Alfred Lunt, lets his face alone in this picture and is as cheerful a villain as he can be a gloomy hero. Lil Dagover is also on view as Tsar-bait. The Hollywood technique of getting the maximum out of a gag or situation is notably lacking in Congress Dances, hence its U. S. success is doubtful. Good shots: Metternich in a darkroom reading code despatches against an illuminated glass screen; legs in the ballet; the fake Tsar doing fancy needlework, singing the "Volga Boat Song."

Germany's touted Lilian Harvey is a gay open-faced little girl (85 lb., 5 ft. 1 in.) who is willing to make faces and can dance. She is 23, born in Muswell Hill, a London suburb, of a German father and English mother. Her parents chose May 1914 to go to Germany for a vacation. She has since lived in Central Europe, studied dancing under Mary Zimmerman, was discovered in Vienna by German Cinema Director Richard Eichberg.

Radio Patrol (Universal) is a story of the radio-car police. Robert Armstrong and Russell Hopton, rookies at the police training school, painfully learn their lessons from Sergeant Sidney Toler, get rough &--tough themselves. At the graduation dance Armstrong takes Hopton's best girl, Lila Lee, later marries her. The two cops work together in the same radio patrol car. Armstrong takes bribe money because his wife is going to have a baby. When Armstrong tries to drive the car out of the district to leave the bank-robbers a clear field, Hopton forces him to drive back, fight it out, get killed. Hopton is free to court the widow.

Shots: A drug addict locked in a room with a woman he is about to murder; Armstrong dying on his way to the hospital, hearing the news of his child's birth over the police radio.

The Rich Are Always With Us (Warner) is a story of sacrifice, divorce and romance among the serious rich. It is also any egocentric woman's dream of the life she would like to be able to look back on. Ruth Chatterton, as one of the richest women in the world, resists her hero (George Brent) to be true to her husband (John Miljan) who is opportunely snared by another woman (Adrienne Dore). Miss Chatterton is free to suffer a little, agreeably, and say the right, the irreproachable things to her husband's hussy. She gets a divorce and is gallant by transatlantic telephone. Men try to forget her but cannot. She fights against her better instincts but all she has are better instincts. When her ex-husband is badly hurt and his new wife killed in an automobile accident she rushes from George Brent to hold her ex-husband's hand, thus saving him from death. But Mr. Brent is at last bored by sacrifice. He persuades her to marry him--and immediately leaves for China. Miss Chatterton stays behind to hold her first husband's hand. She is a martyr and happily married at the same time.

Ruth Chatterton's tough, hangdog look, her husky refined drawl ending on a raised note, go well with the foreverandever emotions, too poignant for tears, as one gentleman to another. She can say: "I love you more than anything on earth" and sound as though she might mean it. She can say: "Please kiss me into needing you" without making the customers scowl. George Brent's underacting goes well with Miss Chatterton's. He is shown as a white man because he will not marry an unmarried girl with money, but cinemorality impels him to want to marry a married woman with more money.

Director Alfred E. Green has used specific properties--New York's Club Lido, the 5. S. Bremen. The famed tooth-pick-against-bedroom-door trick used by Kentucky detectives at Theodore Dreiser's expense (TIME, Nov. 23) is borrowed with a hairpin variation.

--The Congress of Vienna was never very far from reality. The Treaty of Paris had concluded peace in May 1814, incidentally mentioning a general rendezvous two months later in Vienna, to parcel out Napoleon's empire. No official summons was ever issued but in two months nearly every major European diplomat was in Vienna. Most of them might as well have been cinemactors; only five nations had anything to say: victorious Russia, Prussia, Austria, England and defeated France. They dealt behind doors, not in open Congress, through shrewd diplomats, not bemedaled clotheshorses. Metternich, the Tsar, and France's Talleyrand were the most important. Talleyrand, although he represented the losing Power, was able to break into the negotiations and align England and Austria against Russia and Prussia. Nor did the Congress break up when Napoleon escaped from Elba. It stayed until shortly before Waterloo, until the last scrap of Napoleon's empire had been disposed of.

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