The New Pictures

A Farewell to Arms (Paramount) will disappoint only those pessimists who, hearing about the difficulties that cropped up during the adaptation of Author Hemingway's sad novel and remembering that it made a wretched play, expected it to be a classic botch. But the picture emerges as a compelling and beautifully imagined piece of work, brilliantly directed by Frank Borzage, acted to perfection by Gary Cooper -- whose numb mannerisms are pre cisely appropriate to his role -- and by Helen Hayes, whose performance is certainly as good as her work in The Sin of Madelon Claudet which the cinema Academy last month voted best of the year. Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H. P. Garrett, two onetime reporters who wrote the scenario, had the good sense to use chunks of dialog by Hemingway wherever they fitted in. When they had to put in dialog of their own they did it so adroitly that only someone who had memorized the book would know the difference. Their changes in the story were judicious. Lieu tenant Frederic Henry meets Nurse Catherine Barkley outside a brothel when so befuddled that he mistakes her for one of its inmates. His friend Rinaldi (Adolphe Menjou), in the capacity of censor, returns unopened Nurse Barkley's letters to her lover when he is on the Italian front and when she is in Switzer land waiting to have a baby. Cinema's ethical code had in this case the effect of prompting the ingenuity of Scenarists Glazer & Garrett. The scene at a Milan hospital in which a priest mumbles a marriage ceremony adds nothing to the story but it is an effective incident in itself. The only stupid touch in the picture comes in the final moment after the tragedy of Catherine's death -- when Lieutenant Henry picks up her corpse, looks out of the window at an armistice celebration and loudly remarks: "Peace!" After this comes an unreasonable photograph of flying pigeons.

The report that the Italian Government, by threatening to bar Paramount pictures from Italy, had caused the retreat from Caporetto to be deleted is untrue photographically, the Caporetto sequences are the most effective in the picture. The report that Paramount had given A Farewell to Arms a happy ending has more truth in it. A conclusion in which Catherine Barkley does not die in childbirth was made but will not be used unless cinemaddicts resent the present one. Informed by Paramount that two prints of A Farewell to Arms could be sent to Piggott, Ark. for his inspection. Author Hemingway last week replied: ''Use your imagination as to where to put the two prints ... of Borzage version of A Farewell to Arms but do not send her." Central Park (First National). Written by a New York Sun theatrical reporter, Ward Morehouse. this picture exhibits Manhattan's largest pleasance. not as an outdoor nursery for perambulated babies, a sleeping porch for the tenement district and a cyuosure for sightseers, but as a battlefield of crime and bestiality, a sink of dissipation. The picture starts with a theft of hotdogs by two hungry, penniless young lovers. A pair of racketeers pretending to be detectives whisk the girl (Joan Blondell) away to the Central Park Casino, force her to aid their scheme for robbing the till of an unemployment benefit. Her young man (Wallace Ford) finds out about the crookery in time to catch the criminals by chasing them through the park in a high-powered car.

This is the main plot line of Central Park, but the picture is full of extraordinary bypaths. A lunatic appears in the zoo and tries to get even with one of the keepers for not feeding the animals enough meat. An aged policeman (Guy Kibbee) loses his badge for failing to apprehend the lunatic but not until a lion (Jackie, of the Selig Zoo, Los Angeles) has escaped from his cage and crawled into a taxicab from which he presently emerges to enter the Casino just after its guests have survived the shock of the holdup. All this assorted violence, sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical, makes Central Park a thoroughly diverting, wholly unreliable portrait of an environment which most small children find dull because it contains nothing more dangerous than rocks, squirrels and bad-tempered nurses.

Uptown New York (World Wide) is in a quieter vein than Central Park (see above), a three-cornered Bronx romance about a blonde Patricia (Shirley Grey) who marries a chewing gum salesman (Jack Oakie) after she has had a love affair with a successful surgeon (Leon Waycoff). The time comes when, to save Patricia's life after an accident, it is necessary for the surgeon to operate on her. Eddie, her husband, decides that after all Patricia likes the surgeon best; to facilitate her leaving him, he absents himself from home. When Patricia guesses what he has done, she goes to find him, sitting in a jail which is presumably meant to be the dirty one at Amsterdam Avenue and 152nd Street.

Uptown New York was written by Vina Delmar with dangerous recklessness as to motivation but with a good eye for local color. The hero and heroine meet each other in a ladies' room--which, as the cinema becomes less pastoral, is growing in popularity as a romantic setting--but thereafter the story manages to keep closer to the kitchen than the bathroom. Good sequence: Eddie taking his girl to a wrestling match, proposing to her during a flying mare. Flesh (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Poor old Wallace Beery does not have a very happy time in the Cinema. He is too ugly to be a hero, too lumbering to be a comedian, too much of a numbskull and oaf to be a villain. He is, in short, a character actor and like most character actors he usually winds up (in the parlance of the type he customarily impersonates) behind the eight-ball.* In The Champ Wallace Beery was a sad superannuated pugilist. In Flesh he is a German wrestler named Polikai, gentle, generous, an easy mark for such a slick girl as Lora Nash (Karen Morley) who is the mistress of a thief (Ricardo Cortez) and the mother of a little illegitimate shaver. The thief undertakes to be Polikai's manager. Soon the whole menage--Polikai, Nash, thief and shaver--go from Germany to the U. S., where the thief tries to prearrange Polikai's match for the championship and to mistreat Lora Nash. Polikai strangles the thief, throws the champion (Wladek Zbyszko, who also appears briefly in Uptown New York}, goes to jail. Actor Emil Jannings, of whom Wallace Beery is coming to be the U. S. equivalent, appeared in a picture called Variety which had a plot noticeably similar to that of Flesh. However, when Edmund Goulcling (who directed Grand Hotel) wrote Flesh, and when John Ford directed it. they would have done well to remember more of Variety than the outline of the story. Flesh moves in a lugubrious way, too slowly to be exciting, and perspiring with pathos.

* In the pool game called "black-ball." the player who knocks the eight (black)-ball into a pocket automatically loses.

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