The New Pictures

Hell Below (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The combination of moods in this picture --engine room realism and chivalric romance--could not be a happy one in any medium. It could scarcely be attempted in anything but cinema, which can be immensely graphic and must usually be sentimental. The narrative of Hell Below concerns a young submarine lieutenant (Robert Montgomery) who falls in love with a woman (Madge Evans) whose husband has been unmanned in the War. At first he plans to live with her but the girl's father (Walter Huston), the lieutenant's commanding officer, presently makes him feel that to do so would be despicable. The lieutenant therefore brutally and gallantly insults his inamorata--to make her hate him--and then dies a hero's death by driving his boat, loaded with explosives, into an enemy fortification--much after the manner of two of the principals in Today We Live. All this is as implausible as it is fancy, hut what is neither implausible nor fancy in Hell Below are scenes in the control room of the submarine with men dying slowly of chlorine gas; torpedoes arrowing smoothly toward German mine layers; depth bombs going off near the submarine's bow; a German cruiser exploding and sinking. In a picture so muddled in texture it is not surprising to find two comedians, Sterling Holloway and Jimmy Durante, cast in opposite types of roles. More startling is the fact that the experiment turns out so well. It is hard to say which is more effective--Durante's boxing match with a kangaroo when he and his shipmates are on shore leave, or Holloway's cracked voice and low comedy face when he is slowly choking to death in a room full of gas. tapping the wall with a hammer and unable to understand why none of the crew, whom he can see through a panel of glass, comes to let him out. Looking Forward (Cosmopolitan). The title of this picture, noisily borrowed from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's book with the President's permission, has almost no pertinence at all. Looking Forward, adapted from a London play by C. L. Anthony, is neither political tract nor visionary romance; it is a department store homily in which Lionel Barrymore takes a terrific fall in the world from the position he held in Sweepings. In Sweepings he was the tycoon owner of a Chicago Bazaar who made his general manager eat humble pie. In Looking Forward he is Benton. a miserable bookkeeper in a London emporium named Service's. His employer sacks him for general incompetence and inappropriate geniality. When Benton has retired to his suburban cottage to start a baking business with his wife and children, the picture goes into the family affairs of Gabriel Service (Lewis Stone), shows him to be, like most department store owners in the cinema, dignified, harassed and nepotistical. When his children seem bored with his business and times grow harsh, he decides to sell out to a chain store operator. Then his young wife (Benita Hume) leaves him, his children vouch for their interest in the store and he meets old Benton eating his lunch in a little graveyard back of Service's employes' entrance. Benton points out that the motto on one of the tombstones--"Be Not Afraid"-- may be even better for a live man than a dead one. Gabriel Service decides not to sell his store, has his old employe in for tea. As an incentive to optimism the picture is muddled, but like everything else in which one of the Barrymore brothers appears it has grand moments. Typical shot: Barrymore telling his wife and children how cut up Gabriel Service was about discharging him. Reunion in Vienna (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) avoids all the obvious pitfalls into which an adaptation of a brilliant stage comedy can easily fall. It remains wise and humorous, retains the air of spontaneity which translations so often lose. People who saw Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Robert E. Sherwood's play may be amused by the way John Barrymore makes Lunt's fiercely romantic posturings seem tame by comparison, and by the enigmatic inflections Diana Wynyard gives the role which Miss Fontanne made lusty and spectacular. The decor of MGM's expert Cedric Gibbons, the direction of Sidney Franklin and the clever casting of Frank Morgan, who looks a little like Barrymore, for the role of Dr. Krug all help to make the picture a suave and ingratiating transcription, which should repay in prestige what it loses at the box office.

The story, as everyone knows, tells what happens when a Habsburg archduke turned taxi-driver meets his former mistress at a party given for the fallen nobility in Frau Lucher's Viennese hotel. It takes one night and several bottles of brandy to make the archduke suspect that perhaps changing circumstance has made him less a Habsburg than a cabby in fancy dress; and to convince the mistress that her psychiatrist husband may not be taking his patients' fees under false pretences. As in many good comedies, it is the attenuated tragedy under the surface of Reunion in Vienna that makes its gayety so satisfying. Good shot: the arch duke departing from Frau Lucher's -- patterned after Vienna's famed Hotel Sacher -- to pursue his mistress to her husband's apartment, with arrogant instructions to the other guests to keep the party alive until he returns. Song of the Eagle (Paramount). If you care to pursue the misfortunes of a family of beer brewers during the years 1916 to 1933, you can do so by seeing this picture. One of old Otto Hoffman's sons is killed in the War. With the arrival of Prohibition, his best barrel-roller (Charles Bickford) turns 'legger. Hoffman (Jean Hersholt) patiently awaits the day when brewing will be legal again but by the time it arrives, he has lost most of his money and some of his good humor. When beer is finally legalized, gangsters shoot old Hoffman and it takes his son (Richard Arlen) and several friends to avenge the old man's death with tactics they learned in the Army. Somewhere in all this there may have been the germ of a potent picture but if so it was sterilized by second-rate dialog and second-hand situations. What is left are a few authentic and interesting episodes--like the contest in wagon-loading by Hoffman's drivers--strung together on the thin thread of a skillful performance by Hersholt.

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