The New Pictures

My Pal, the King (Universal). The last things any cinemaddict might expect to find in a mythical kingdom like Alvonia are Tony, Tom Mix's piebald cowpony, and Tom Mix himself, in a cowboy hat. But both appear, Mix as headman of an itinerant Wild West Show, Tony as his factotum. The function of Mix and Tony never varies in the cinema; they are an equestrian first-aid kit, a rescue team. This time they rescue the small king of Alvonia (Mickey Rooney) twice: first when the horses of the Wild West stage coach, in which he is getting a free ride, run away; next when the bad prime minister of Alvonia has imprisoned the king and his faithful tutor in a dungeon and is planning to drown them both by flooding the dungeon. A weird but not entirely indigestible mixture of bucking bronchos and court romance, My Pal, the King is plainly intended for children.

Hat Check Girl (Fox) sets out as a fable of true love in Manhattan between a hat check girl (Sally Eilers) and a millionaire's son (Ben Lyon). Finding this theme thin as well as improbable, it pads itself out with winter sports scenes, night club shows, the slimy trail of a blackmailing scandal-sheet editor, underworld ramifications, subway interludes. The unreality of the proceedings is heightened by the two leading players' conflicting ideas of what the picture is about. Ben Lyon tries ably to play it as light comedy. Sally Eilers, stiff and strained, registering emotion by twisting her fingers and looking wan, tries to make it a serious business. Neither succeeds.

The story shows Sally Eilers declining to sell liquor for the bootlegging hat-check overlord as she consents at his request to go to a playboy's party. Irritably chaste, she accepts the use of an empty apartment where the returning owner (Ben Lyon) finds her in bed. True love is instantaneous. Menaces appear in the persons of the hat-check overlord who "frames" her, and the scandal sheet editor who is part of her past. They operate to defer the marriage until the editor is found dead and Ben Lyon is arrested for the murder. When this mistake has been corrected and all the tentacles of the octopus city have finally been disengaged, the happy pair, trying to be respectively playful and poignant, go off to get married.

Red Dust (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a rowdy exposition of bed manners on a rubber plantation back of Saigon, French Indo-China. In the persons of Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, impersonating a harlot and a lusty planter, two predatory carnivores are brought together, happily rend each other.

Harlot Harlow is associated with Gable's drunken overseer, Donald Crips, when she spies Gable who has already spied Mary Astor. the ultra-refined wife of his new engineer. Gene Raymond. While Miss Astor snubs the coarse Harlow, Gable doctors Raymond through an attack of tropical fever, leers Astorwards, lays his plans. Upon Raymond's recovery he sends him off to set up a construction camp sufficiently far away from the plantation to make commuting impossible. His leers mount in ferocity and effectiveness and Mary Astor succumbs, loses her self respect, gets sloppy. Harlot Harlow discovering that she has taste if not morals, becomes contemptuous of them both. The Harlow taste at length infects Gable. He tries to shake off Mary Astor, gets shot by her as the belatedly suspicious husband drops in. Jean Harlow tells him his wife fired in defense of her virtue. The Raymonds kiss and leave on the next boat, leaving Jean Harlow to nurse Gable back for their mutual hearty enjoyment.

Given Red Dust's brazen moral values, Gable & Harlow have full play for their curiously similar sort of good-natured toughness. The best lines go to Harlow. She bathes hilariously in a rain barrel, reads Gable a bedtime story about a chipmunk and a rabbit. Her effortless vulgarity, humor and slovenliness make a noteworthy characterization, as good in the genre as the late Jeanne Eagels' Sadie Thompson. Noteworthy too is the fake jungle, a marvel of impenetrability.

Jean Harlow quit work in Red Dust for a week when her second husband, Paul Bern Levy, assistant production chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, shot himself dead (TIME, Sept. 19). Soon afterward the body of Bern's common-law first wife, Dorothy Millette, clothed in a black silk dress, was found in Georgiana Slough in the Sacramento River, caught in brushwood under low-hanging willows. Bern's will left all he had to Jean Harlow, but the Sacramento Public Administrator claimed half his estate for the estate of Dorothy Millette as his "legal" wife. In Hollywood, Jean Harlow in highly becoming black dropped the subject. Audiences at Red Dust watched her face for traces of the tragedy, found none.

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