The New Pictures

Six Hours to Live (Fox). The hero of this picture is cinema's most extraordinary corpse, Captain Paul Onslow, the head diplomat of a country called Sylvaria, who has been strangled by his political opponents. One of those loose-lipped scientists who exist only in countries like Sylvaria takes a quick look at Captain Onslow's cadaver and says that he can revivify it, for six hours. He does so with a display of electricity and a large glass barrel.

Revived, Captain Onslow (Warner Baxter) is in a peculiar position. He is affianced to a blonde Baroness Von Sturm (Miriam Jordan) but he decides that it would be more generous to break the engagement so that she will fall in love with his rival (John Boles). Highly satisfied with his experience of death, he is able to reassure an old lady that her departed son is well and happy, a small girl that her little brother has elephants to play with. He attends an important conference in time to cast the vote that defeats a treaty which would have injured Sylvaria. Then he confronts his murderer. Shortly afterward, smiling bravely and clutching at his boutonniere, he dies for the second time, peacefully, in a garden.

Pictures based on pseudo-philosophical ideas need to be developed with proper kind of dramatic emphasis to be as effective as, for instance, Outward Bound. This one is not. It moves too slowly and its ingenious story idea does not conceal the fact that its authors were so dazzled by their plot that they failed to investigate its possibilities. Warner Baxter performs with the dignity proper to a patriot aware that he is dead. Ablest things in the picture are probably the work of its director, William Dieterle, and the shot of a crowd which has heard about the Captain's demise, parting in front of him as he walks toward the steps of the conference building.

The Phantom of Crestwood (RKO). Before this mystery picture was released last fortnight, it was exploited in an ingenious way. Once a week for six weeks National Broadcasting Company (like RKO a subsidiary of Radio Corp. of America) broadcast chapters worked up from the scenario of the picture. The radio script did not reveal the solution to the mystery; radio listeners were invited to suggest conclusions for the story, for $6,000 in prizes. The prize contest disguised the real purpose of the broadcast: to create such suspense among the radio audience that all would rush to see the cinema. Advertisements for the trade called The Phantom of Crestwood "the picture that was presold to a hundred million," assured exhibitors that "all America wants to know who killed Jenny Wren."

Jenny Wren (Karen Morley) is a loose lady who, at a house party which she has caused to be given in her honor, blackmails four of her previous admirers for $500,000. When she is found dead, with a feathered dart in the back of her neck, it seems at first quite easy to guess who did it. Presently it becomes more difficult. A lugubrious old man might have done it because Jenny Wren caused his son to commit suicide. A gaunt spinster (Pauline Frederick) might have done it because her nephew wants to marry Jenny Wren's sister. So might a chipper crook (Ricardo Cortez), who gobbles peppermints and seems much interested in Jenny Wren's mail. Instead, it is the crook who solves the mystery, while a thunderstorm rages outside and a phosphorescent death mask floats about between the trees. Good sequences: flashback to reveal what the suspects say when questioned about what they were doing at the time of the murder.

If it is true that 100 million persons want to know who killed Jenny Wren, it is a pity that the matter cannot be settled immediately and forever. This is impossible. It may be that in the picture the gaunt spinster is the one who jabs Jenny. But the prizes for endings will not be awarded until Thanksgiving and the prize-winners need not conform with the picture. The only satisfactory ending for The Phantom of Crestwood would be to borrow the glass barrel in Six Hours to Live (see col. 1), allow Jenny Wren to settle the matter herself.

Secrets of the French Police (RKO), secrets wholly unlike those of the U. S. police, form a pleasantly lurid fable in which the Paris gendarmery is faced with the improbable task of snaring a rogue whose nastiest proclivity is for turning his enemies into statues. This rogue (Gregory Ratoff) abducts a happy and prosperous flower girl (Gwili Andre), murders her aged father and plants evidence to incriminate her pickpocket lover. Then, in his shadowy chateau, he sets about hypnotizing her into a counterfeit princess, since he needs one for dishonest purposes. The prefect of police (Frank Morgan) is clever. He sets the pickpocket free with instructions to solve the mystery. The pickpocket not only does so but he filches so successfully in and about the rogue's chateau that when he has rescued his flower girl by a narrow margin they will have enough to live on for a long time to come. Secrets of the French Police was adapted from H. Ashton-Wolfe's Secrets of the Surete and Samuel Ornitz' The Lost Empress, retaining the wildest features of each.

Faithless (MGM). Having tried four times without much success to find a satisfactory vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead, whose eyelids have been compared to the fat stomachs of sunburned babies,* Paramount decided to lend her to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and see what happened. Faithless will probably leave Miss Bankhead about where she was before. She has a more full-bodied role than in Thunder Below, Tarnished Lady, My Sin and The Devil and The Deep, and a better leading man (Robert Montgomery). Otherwise, the picture is in the Bankhead tradition, a solemn sexual mumbo-mumbo of wealth impoverished and beauty in distress.

As Carol Morgan, a wastrel million-heiress, loosely in love with a young advertising executive named Bill Wade (Robert Montgomery), Miss Bankhead is in fine fettle as the picture starts. She tells her banker she will contribute no more money to the Morgan Home for Wayward Girls but spend it on her own amusements. Sure enough, the day arrives when Carol Morgan regrets her hasty selfishness. Money and position gone, married to Wade, who has lost his job and lies ill in a rooming house, she has become a prostitute to get money for the doctor. Best characterization in the picture is Hugh Herbert's as a Chicago sport who undertakes to support Carol Morgan between the time she loses her money and the time she marries Wade. Baffled when his mistress snubs him, he turns on the radio, throws her on the floor.

*Metro-Gokhvyn-Mayer's Couturier Adrian, who designed her gowns for this picture.

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