The New Pictures

Midnight Mary (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is another sample of Hollywood's current investigation of the beneficent effect of penal institutions on their adolescent inmates. Mary (Loretta Young), like Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man, is an alumna of the reformatory but she has a law-abiding nature. When aiding her accomplice Leo (Ricardo Cortez) to rob a cabaret, she saved a handsome young patrician named Tom Mannering Jr. (Franchot Tone) from being murdered. He rewards her with a job in his law office. She is already affianced to her employer when sent to a jail for a crime that she committed long before. Cinema stories by Anita Loos, of which this is one and Hold Your Man another, have a way of starting bravely and curdling into fatigued sentimentality. Lawyer Mannering marries a girl of his own class while Mary is in prison. She gets out in time to save his life again, this time by shooting her old friend Leo. A jury finds her guilty of murder and Lawyer Mannering has to intercede to save her life. A familiar melodrama done in an expensive and sometimes ingenious manner, Midnight Mary is distinguished by the work of Interior Decorator Hobe Erwin and by another competent performance by Franchot Tone. When Franchot Tone emigrated from the Manhattan stage last autumn, his work in plays like Green Grow the Lilacs, The House of Connelly, Success Story, had caused him to be considered perhaps the most intelligent young actor on Broadway. Drama Critic Stark Young of the New Republic wrote an accolade in which he suggested that Actor Tone's roles were "played from a solid, flexible and imaginative basis such as no other of our young actors and few of the older can show." suggested that it would be "interesting . . . to see what moving-picture publicity can build up in his case." Because Actor Tone lacks the flamboyant physical characteristics which Hollywood most prizes he has been almost as much of a problem to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Critic Young anticipated. So far he has been a tongue-tied torpedo launch lieutenant in Today null a hero-worshipping secretary in Gabriel Over the White House ; and, currently, an aristocrat with indecision. Nonetheless, in parts which have had none of the richness of his stage roles, he has given three performances each of which possessed a shade more than the mechanical competence which Hollywood demands of subsidiary performers. Son of Frank Jerome Tone, president of Carborundum Co., Franchot Tone went to Hill School and Cornell, where he got a Phi Beta Kappa key and ran the Dramatic Club. He played in stock for a year before Guthrie McClintic put him in the Age of Innocence, with Katharine Cornell. Last winter, Hollywood gossipmongers observed him escorting Joan Crawford, whom he will play opposite in his next picture, Dancing Lady.

The Mayor of Hell (Warner) is the Hollywood equivalent of a Russian picture called The Road to Life which was exhibited in the U. S. a year ago. The differences are interesting. The Road to Life was frankly propaganda for Soviet reform schools; as such, its earnest enthusiasm made it valid, exciting. The Mayor of Hell, far more adroit, far more cleverly invented, is propaganda for nothing. Like most of what comes out of Hollywood it is entertaining trash. In addition to the subject matter of The Road to Life, Director Archie Mayo borrowed a few story-telling devices from the foreign cinema. Thus the picture starts with a sequence in which half a dozen typical ragamuffins--Jew, colored boy, drunkard's son--are, one by one, committed to an institution. The overseer of the school, Thompson (Dudley Digges), is a snarling Simon Legree, who feeds his students hogwash. When Patsy Gargan (James Cagney) visits the institution in the capacity of deputy commissioner he decides to change all this--mainly because he has fallen in love with the trained nurse (Madge Evans) and she has an idea that student government and more vitamins are what the boys need. Director Mayo did not need to go abroad to borrow the pinwheel melodrama with which the picture ends. Gargan shoots one of his underlings in a political club, gets back to the school in time to quiet his rioting students who have already set tire to the campus, frightened Thompson--who has been mistreating them again in Gargan's absence--into jumping out of a window.

Bed of Roses (RKO) gives Constance Bennett a chance to vary her roole of a tough girl in high life to that of a tough girl in low life. As Lorry Evans, she gets to New Orleans from a Louisiana prison by stealing $60 on a river steamer, leaping into the Mississippi, and getting fished out by a sentimental barge-captain named Mike (Joel McCrea). From this point her problems are routine. Though Mike's honest love is never quite forgotten, she easily blackmails a rich publisher into providing her with elaborate shelter, including a bed of satin. She continues to call occasionally at Mike's barge where catfish dinners eventually persuade her that she dislikes luxury.

Samarang (Bennie F. Zeldman) is a thin slice of life among the Malay pearl divers, made by Ward Wing and his wife. Lori Bara, sister of Theda Bara. When they went to Samarang, the Wings were fortunate enough to find, first of all, a native girl too poor to have her teeth covered with gold. She was Sai-Yu, a 17-year-old dancer in a Malay theatre. Her father did not want her to act in cinema but since she was under contract to the local theatre, his objections made no difference. They discovered also a handsome young native named Ahmang, part Portuguese, part Dyak. Son of a Malay chief who earns a living by making pins out of the gold he pans at the mouth of a river near Samarang, Ahmang was too proud to take a salary for acting, so the Wings reimbursed his parent. The Wings' camera shows Ahmang and Sai-Yu dog-paddling about the bottom of the ocean wearing handkerchiefs around their middles and picking oysters. They encounter surprisingly mild adventures when stranded on a cannibal island. The Wings also discovered a chipper little urchin called Ko-Hai. Ko-Hai was foolish enough (in Lori Bara's little story) to be bitten to death by a shark. After his funeral, Ahmang avenges this mishap by killing the shark with a knife. Samarang is a silent picture, with musical accompaniment. It is pleasing scenically and photographically. In the inevitable fight--between an octopus and a shark--the shark wins. The stagiest shot is the one that was really most dangerous to make--a python coiling around a native who had been directed to yelp when the coil grew uncomfortably tight. Instead of yelping, the native fainted, had to be rescued by four of his confreres. Sai-Yu, who watched the python shooting, cried all that day.

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