The New Pictures

Rackety Rax (Fox) is a brilliant travesty on college football and racketeering. It starts when a gangster, Knucks McGloin (Victor McLaglen) is escorted to his first football game by his publicity agent. Speed Bennett (Arthur Pierson).

Speed: Now listen, chief, you can't fool with football. It's the only serious thing left any more. . . .

Knucks: I've made up my mind. We gotta get a college.

Speed: How are you going to do it?

Knucks: That's easy. We'll capture a college. I'll pick one out and surround it with gorillas.

Persuaded to choose a more temperate course, McGloin first tries to buy out Fordham, then West Point and Annapolis. Finally he founds a Carnarsie University, acquires competent coaches, converts his stable of plug-uglies and wrestlers into a terrifying football team. After a season of phenomenal success. McGloin accepts a post-season game against an obscure team called Lake Shore University. Soon after the contest starts, McGloin realizes what has happened: Lake Shore University is backed by a Chicago gang as shameless as his own. The game becomes an armageddon in which machine guns rattle, bombs are thrown, punts shot down. Presently no one much is left except the appalled press agent and a pretty girl sportswriter (Nell O'Day). Rackety Rax was adapted from Joel Sayre's brief novel first published in the American Mercury last January. It uses a simpler technique than recent pictures in the same vein (Once in a Lifetime, The Phantom President) to attain hilarious absurdity. It simply allows the behavior of its characters, who are presented in straightforward fashion, to reach a logical extreme. Good shot: McGloin using a "lie detector" on a speakeasy proprietor.

Smilin' Through (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an old-fashioned cinema, gentle, lachrymose and romantic, calculated to make the throat of any susceptible cinemaddict like that of a giraffe swallowing oranges. The first lump occurs when John Carteret (Leslie Howard) is found moping, at the turn of the century, in his handsome English garden. Disconsolate about a dead fiancee, he is reluctant to console himself by becoming foster-father to her orphaned niece Kathleen. The niece grows up into Norma Shearer and falls in love with a young American (Fredric March) who has come to England to enlist in the War. When Kathleen tells her foster-father the name of her admirer--Kenneth Wayne--the whole story comes out. Kenneth Wayne's father is the man who jealously murdered John Carteret's fiancee on her wedding day. As though this were not enough of a handicap for the romance between Kenneth and Kathleen, Wayne comes home from the War on crutches. With misplaced gallantry, he tells Kathleen he does not love her any more. Finally, John Carteret dies. In the vague habiliments of an apparition, in company with the apparition of his dead fiancee, Moonyeen, he watches his foster-daughter and Kenneth Wayne walk up the garden path together.

No restatement of the plot of Smilin' Through"conceived by Jane Cowl who acted in it in 1919-22--can make it seem other than a balderdash tearjerker. Basically this is a fair estimate of the picture. But Smilin' Through possesses also all the qualities which make cinema a persuasive art and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the most persuasive of cinemanufacturers. Director Sidney Franklin* treated his story with the manner appropriate for an afternoon in the attic peeking at grandmother's love letters. Leslie Howard and Fredric March act with finish and aplomb. Norma Shearer's part, immensely different from the ones she has lately played in parlor tragedies, is the one Norma Talmadge originated for the cinema in 1922. Miss Shearer performs it ably, a little less effectively in a blonde wig as Moonyeen than later as the grown-up Kathleen.

Madison Square Garden (Paramount). Local color has been an increasing fad in the cinema for the last two years and this picture is its apotheosis. There are some 19 shots of real sporting events at Manhattan's famed arena (which does not resemble a garden and is about two miles from Madison Square). An exact replica of the Garden marquee was made in Hollywood and reappears constantly. The faces of Jack Johnson, Stanislaus Zbyszko, Tommy Ryan, Billy Papke and Tod Sloan are introduced briefly; they represent the tradition of clean, wholesome sport. The picture was made during the Olympic Games at Los Angeles and it was therefore feasible for Paramount to persuade several real sportswriters to perform in it. Grantland Rice, Westbrook Pegler, Paul Gallico. Damon Runyon. Jack Lait appear momentarily, drinking coffee; Runyon speaks but Pegler is to be recognized only by his right out. In all this welter of authenticity, it is only natural for the story of Madison Square Garden to seem a little unreal by comparison. It is mainly about a young middleweight (Jack Oakie) and his manager (William Collier Sr.). The manager takes the job of matchmaker at the Garden and the middleweight, left to shift for himself, falls into the hands of a racketeering manager. Partly because Oakie's opponent is Mushey Callahan, a onetime contender for the U. S. welterweight championship, the climactic prizefight is better organized than most such scuffles in the cinema. Callahan has plaster of Paris on his bandages to make his fists hard, but it is not enough to knock out Oakie. When the fight is over, Oakie reassures his girl (Marion Nixon), then goes, accompanied by the other right-thinking members of the cast including Jack Johnson, to take physical revenge on the racketeers. Good shot: an addled headed wrestler (Warren Hymer) training in a gymnasium which is an exact reproduction of Lou Stillman's at 316 W. 5th St., Manhattan.

Thirteen Women (RKO) is a miscount. Author Tiffany Thayer, having written a book called Thirteen Men, felt that he had to change either the number or the sex for its sequel. In his book he struggled manfully to round out his baker's dozen but in the picture there was room for only ten of his heroines. This is just as well. They are an uninteresting crew who belonged to the same sorority in a girls' finishing school. One by one, three of them drop dead. Their high mortality rate is due to a half-caste girl (Myrna Loy) who was not allowed to join the sorority and has been nursing her grudge. As assistant to a dizzy astrologer ( Henry Gordon) she has written poison pen letters to all her snobbish schoolmates. She is preparing to follow up her disastrous circulars with more direct methods when a smart detective (Ricardo Cortez) catches up with her on the back platform of an express train.

One of the heroines of Thirteen Women who evades the suicide predicted for her in the picture is Hazel (Peg Entwhistle). In Hollywood last month. Peg Entwhistle committed suicide by jumping from a huge illuminated sign.

One Way Passage (Warner). Whether or not it is true, as Jack Warner last week insisted, that Warner Brothers starts the cycles that other Hollywood companies finish, it is generally conceded that Warner's strong point lies in selecting stories. One Way Passage, by Robert Lord, is several notches above the Warner average. An escaped murderer (William Powell) meets a charming lady (Kay Francis) in a Hongkong bar. They fall in love. The next time they meet, on shipboard, the murderer is on his way to be hanged. His inamorata expects to die very shortly of a weak heart. Each learns of the other's predicament. They do not reveal their knowledge to each other. Before they part at San Francisco, they gaily engage to meet on New Year's Eve at Agua Caliente. A quiet, sharp, romantic tragedy. One Way Passage was directed with the sense of pace and compression it required by Tay Garnett.

*No kin to Sidney Franklin (Frumkin), Brooklyn bull-fighter.

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