The New Pictures

Red Headed Woman (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is adapted from Katherine Brush's best seller. The picture is a quick, caustic biography of an alert, successful strumpet. From her stenographer's desk in the Legendre Coal Company, Lil (Jean Harlow) quickly finds her way into the lap of Bill Legendre (Chester Morris), from there to the Legendre living room where Mrs. Legendre discovers her. Presently, there occurs a scene in a roadhouse telephone-booth which contains both Bill & Lil. Lil says: "You can't get along without me," and proves she is right by marrying Bill when his first wife has divorced him.

Before much longer Lil loses interest in Legendre. She takes up with her chauffeur and a visiting socialite named Gaerste. When she follows Gaerste to Manhattan, Bill follows also to tell Gaerste about the chauffeur. Lil chases her husband home, shoots him, leaves him being nursed by the first Mrs. Legendre. When Legendre, remarried to his first wife, is traveling with her in Europe, they catch one more glimpse of Lil. Gay and more pleased with herself than she should be, she has an Hispano-Suiza, a racehorse, a Marquis, in addition to her chauffeur, Albert.

Week-End Marriage (First National). In cinema, when you find a husband & wife buying dinner at a delicatessen, you should suspect that they will be unhappy. In this case, Loretta Young has no time to cook for Norman Foster because she is working in an office, in itself a bad sign. When Norman Foster has lost his job and Loretta Young has had her salary raised, their situation grows acute. Foster takes to drink. Loretta Young goes on a business trip. Finally, Foster falls sick and his wife comes home to nurse him.

Week-End Marriage points a familiar lesson in a banal way, but it is well acted, well directed by Thornton Freeland, and dealing with conventional surfaces, it does so honestly. The story was adapted from Faith Baldwin's Part Time Wives. The opening scene is almost word for word from Maxwell Anderson's Saturday's Children which Warner Brothers produced as a cinema in 1929.

Strangers of the Evening (Tiffany). Murder mysteries are easy to parody because they depend upon complications which can easily be exaggerated into absurdity and because audiences, chilled by touches of the macabre, are ready to giggle with relief as well whenever the macabre bubbles over into the incredible. Strangers of the Evening, adapted from Tiffany Thayer's story The Illustrious Corpse, starts in an undertaker's parlor where a young embalmer (Harold Waldridge) is preparing to exercise his talents on a freshly laid out corpse. When two strangers enter the establishment with another corpse, he becomes confused; when one of the corpses gives signs of returning animation, he becomes terrified, runs away. At this point the story becomes frankly and happily implausible. Police find one corpse in the undertaker's parlor. They pack it off to a gruff old personage named Robert Daniels (Tully Marshall) under the impression that it is his nephew. Daniels' daughter and her husband disappear. A murder appears to have been committed and a dim-witted lady named Sybil (Zasu Pitts) discovers an absent-minded individual dressed in a raincoat who seems to know something about it. Finally, Daniels' daughter and her husband discover the timid embalmer's assistant. He helps to explain matters to the addle-pated police.

Monte Carlo Madness (UFA). Bombarded by Hollywood cinemas with for- eign dialog, European producers have tried to retaliate by making pictures in English. Trying it herein, UFA wisely chose a comedy of the type which German Director Ernst Lubitsch has made popular in the U. S., with Sari Maritza, an actress who reached Hollywood before the picture reached Manhattan, in the leading role. Monte Carlo Madness, as anyone who has ever seen a cinema about Monte Carlo should guess, is no glum study of dementia praecox. The legend from which the plot was derived concerns the captain of a destroyer who squandered his payroll at the Casino gaming tables and threatened to shell the town if the money was not returned. When he got it back, he paid his crew and blew out his brains, but Monte Carlo Madness is a less sordid variation of the incident. The Captain (Hans Albers) is in charge of the one-boat Navy of a place called Pontenero (to rhyme with "zero" and "hero"). When he meets the Queen of Pontenero (Sari Maritza) he mistakes her for a demimondaine and they enjoy a romance. When it becomes known that the Captain has gambled away the ship's payroll, he makes a neat dive over the side and gaily dog-paddles toward a steamer bound for Honolulu. The queen has arranged to get the crew their money. When it arrives, she orders the destroyer to proceed toward Honolulu in the Captain's wake.

Small (5 ft. 1 in.) Sari Maritza chose her name because she wanted a Viennese sounding one that no one would mispronounce. She considered her real one-- Patricia Detering-Nathan-- insufficiently romantic. Daughter of a British Army officer who owned a coal mine at Tientsin, she formed an inclination to be a cinemactress ten years ago while passing through Hollywood to England for her schooling. In 1928, when she was 18, a small part in an Austrian cinema got her a job with an English producing company. She was chosen for the lead in The Water Gypsies because Director Basil Dean thought she had the face of a fairy and the sophistication of a siren. When Charlie Chaplin was in England last spring, there were rumors that he and Cinemactress Maritza were engaged, that she would play the lead in his next picture. Instead, she accepted a Paramount contract, boarded the boat two days after an appendectomy. Her first Paramount picture, Forgotten Commandments, released last week, is partly an inconsequential morality play, partly a revival of Cecil De Mille's silent film The Ten Commandments.

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