The New Pictures

There is a natural check on the plausibility of Unashamed (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). It is based on a sensational socialite murder case in Philadelphia (TIME, Nov. 23). Edward Allen was acquitted because the jurors felt that a hole in Francis A. Donaldson Ill's side and none in his elbow indicated that he had had his arm raised to strike, hence had been shot in self-defense, and not solely to avenge the honor of Rose Allen. Unashamed omits this angle, justifies the girl and her brother, gives the dead man a bad name but in general keeps the faith with Philadelphia.

To show base motives on the part of the lover (Monroe Owsley), persimmon-mouthed Helen Twelvetrees is made (unlike Rose Allen) a three-million-dollar heiress. Cad Owsley's villainy is further pointed by his having changed his name. The girl's father (Robert Warwick) and brother (Robert Young) see through his disingenuousness. Helen does not. To force a marriage, Owsley takes her to a hotel overnight, confronts the father next morning. Wild-eyed from an all-night search, the brother is knocked down by the suitor, gets a gun and shoots.

At this point the audience gasps in total surprise, morally convicting the brother of first-degree murder. The picture, how ever, proceeds to show the audience its error, in the courtroom. A novelty is Prosecutor John Miljan's jeering speech: "There is no such law as the unwritten law. . . . Our legislators do not say : 'This is the law but we will not annoy the governor by writing it down.' ... A woman's honor is her own and the shortest word in the English language will protect any woman's honor, and that word is 'No'."

The electric chair is warming for its prey when the girl turns and saves her brother by pretending on the witness-stand to be an abandoned hussy, devoid of feel ing of any kind. This draws the jury's hate to herself, the brother is acquitted, as was youthful Edward Allen in Philadelphia.

Strange Interlude (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Eugene O'Neill's cinematized nine-act play of soul-sucking Nina Leeds drew a record crowd at its Hollywood opening. Translated and truncated to cinema form, it retold capably the story of the woman who needed three men to satisfy her comprehensive fixation on her father. The play's famed soliloquies indicating the thoughts of the characters are retained. As in the play they are of three kinds: 1) to show the secret mind of the speaker; 2) to comment on the dialog; 3) to tell the audience what has happened offstage. As in the play the first kind gives a gathering dramatic effect, the other two are nuisances. These are recorded on the sound track by a double exposure process, the characters meanwhile standing immobile and expressionless facing each other. This gives a recurrent trance effect as though an offstage ventriloquist were at work. Selfconscious, Director Robert Z. Leonard hurried the soliloquies, giving them a furtive quality. The Hollywood audience giggled.

Norma Shearer without her characteristic nervous titter is beautiful and reasonably capable as Nina Leeds, particularly toward the end of the picture as the woman of 40. Clark Gable, perceptibly fatter, is Ned Darrell, the lover. Alexander Kirkland is Sam Evans, the husband. Ralph Morgan has kept his stage part of "dear old Charlie" Marsden, the epicene friend. May Robson as Sam's mother booms compellingly. The modernistic set of Nina's Park Avenue home is excellent. Noteworthy are frequent transparency shots which require a previously photographed background to be fitted to the foreground by the use mainly of a plate-glass screen blasted with flour.

The Hollywood Herald called Strange Interlude "empiric." Critics thought this widely advertised trick play, though undramatic, might interest cinema audiences in a narrative type of cinema, set a new and profitable fashion.

Hollywood Speaks (Columbia), another exercise in self scrutiny by the film industry, begins like What Price Hollywood with an opening at Grauman's Chinese Theatre and ends with suicide and scandal. Pat O'Brien is a critic who needs an aspirin and clutches at the bottle in the hand of an extra girl (Genevieve Tobin). The bottle holds poison. He builds a new life for her, makes her a star while she blandishes a famed director. The director's wife commits suicide, blaming Genevieve Tobin in a note which a blackmailer finds. In retrieving the note Pat O'Brien is obliged to kill the blackmailer. At the trial, Genevieve Tobin sacrifices fame to save her man.

The Purchase Price (Warner) is a simple tale of struggle and blind love in North Dakota. George Brent is a bovine farmer who needs a cook and wife. Barbara Stanwyck, Manhattan nightclub girl, wants to get-away-from-it-all. She answers his advertisement. The picture hews close to the line of probability. The farmer's life is dirty, uncomfortable, exacting. His house is a bare sty. His manners are bad. Repelled at first, Barbara Stanwyck grows to love George Brent as his woes accumulate. A onetime suitor appears, lends Barbara money to pay mortgage interest, is knocked out by Brent, who is then in a position to plant his prizewinning wheat. After the paralyzed winter, the long summer of sweat goes by. The wheat has been harvested when the local villain sets fire to the shocks. In putting out the fire. Barbara Stanwyck swoons. In carrying her back to the house, George Brent feels a rush of emotion, they are ready to settle down.

Rare until recently has been the cinema heroine who preferred the stupid poor man to the bright city fellow. The viewpoint of The Purchase Price is simple and masculine. It advertises the virtue of hard work and loyalty. Good shot: the couple sow ing wheat on the prairie.

Cinemagoers have watched Warner Brothers' hurried development of George Brent into a star to compete with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Clark Gable, who last week took a whopping salary cut (35%). Brent and Gable once acted together in Manhattan with Alice Brady in Love, Honor & Betray, were sometimes mis taken for each other. They are both tall, dark, wide-eyed, slow-moving. Both dress well, move their mouths a good deal when they talk, but they look not much alike. Brent, 28, an Irish newsman's son, was born and educated in Dublin. He joined the famed Abbey Theatre Company in Dublin, later went to Denver with a stock company, then to Manhattan, then to Hollywood. His favorite role was his part opposite Ruth Chatterton in The Rich Are Always With Us. His engagement to marry Ruth Chatterton, not yet divorced from Ralph Forbes, was announced last fortnight (TIME, July 18). His favorite actress is Greta Garbo.

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