The New Pictures

Morning Glory (RKO). This banal story adapted from a play by Zoe Akins brings a stagestruck young girl (Katharine Hepburn) from Vermont to a Manhattan theatrical office where her naive conceit amuses a famed producer (Adolphe Menjou), engages the admiration of a playwright (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and the friendly tutelage of an old actor (C. Aubrey Smith). She vainly loves the producer, uses the other two. When the star of a play demands an impossible salary raise 15 minutes before opening night curtain, the understudy turns out to be the little girl from Vermont who steps into the star's place, leaves critics and friends groggy with awe.

From this immemorial fairy tale, the delicate, muscled face of Heroine Hepburn shines out like a face on a coin. Of the brash little provincial she makes a strangely distinguished character, a little mad from hunger and dreams, absurdly audacious and trusting. Since Christopher Strong, she has toned down her strident voice, taken off some of her "angular swank in gesture and strut, found other ways to register emotion than by dilating her nostrils. In Morning Glory she convinced Manhattan audiences that the playwright had good reason to feel she had the makings of a great actress. Flawless with women, Director Lowell Sherman tried to make all the men act in his own twitching style.

The Power & the Glory (Fox). Hot with his campaign to make Paramount sorry it let him go last September, pear-faced, bankrupt Jesse Louis Lasky was badly wanting something he could call a cinema novelty when able Playwright Preston Sturges brought him the 60-page script of this sentimental tale of a U.S. railroad tycoon. Clapping his hands, Mr. Lasky told Director William K. Howard to shoot it exactly as written, and forthwith broadcast a huge publicity about a revolutionary cinema technic called "narratage." Narratage is a method a century old in fiction writing, perfected in the short novels of Joseph Conrad and the short stories of O. Henry: the trick of chopping a story's straight time sequence into parts, rearranging them arbitrarily and issuing them through the mouth of a bystander.

The Power & the Glory opens with a suicide tycoon's funeral, attended by one true mourner, the tycoon's boyhood chum and confidential secretary. Back in his own parlor, the secretary tells his curious wife what a great good man was the late Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy). The wife rates Garner contrarily, a wicked, brutal, libidinous ingrate. The secretary attempts to come at the conscientiously mixed truth by "narrataging" the tycoon's life. His coaxing voice drones on through the subsequent flashbacks, now & then speaks for the characters as they open their synchronized mouths, sometimes stops to let the characters speak for themselves. The story becomes an argument between secretary and wife in which her specific accusations are indirectly answered by flashbacks, broken by an occasional return to the secretary's parlor for a new accusation.

With the transitional remark, "Why, it seems only yesterday . . ." tycoon and satellite become James Whitcomb Riley boys in a swimming hole. Then, "in no time at all he was president of the road," bullying the directors of Chicago & South Western Railway into buying a little road for spite. Then a flashback to his first trackwalking days, his courtship of prim, big-eyed Sally (Colleen Moore). Then a flash forward to his troubles with his spoiled collegian son at whose angry look he says, "Don't look at me that way, boy. You're giving away too much weight" Then a flashback to his self-education when ambitious Sally walked track in his stead, his first promotion, his son's birth. Then another flash forward to middle-age when the divorcee daughter of a rival tycoon saves her father's business life by persuading Garner to fall in love with her. This leads to the price of "the power and the glory": the broken-hearted suicide of Sally with the question, "Why shouldn't you do what you want to once before you die?" This catapults the doomed tycoon on into marriage with the divorcee, into a brutal handling of a bloody strike, into his wife's affair with his son until, finally, full of "power and glory," peeled of self-respect, he dies by his own hand.

Playwright Sturges, no O. Henry, no Conrad, has ordered his parts to diminish the suspense, not to heighten it. With a technic calling for smart treatment, he has used it on the simplest possible problems, the simplest types of characters: the sentimental bully, Spencer Tracy; busy, smug, clean-toothed Colleen Moore; wickedly beauteous Helen Vinson; the caddish son Clifford Jones. Like Producer Lasky, Colleen Moore was making a comeback too, hers after a four-year absence from films. She and Spencer Tracy, their emotions confined largely to work and sorrow, gave performances rated by Manhattan critics as "inspired." Before last week's premiere at Manhattan's Gaiety Theatre Miss Moore primly unveiled a bronze plaque marking the scene of "the first public presentation of ... the first motion picture in which narratage was used as a method of telling a dramatic story."

Captured (Warner). Into a German prison camp come two British officers, Leslie Howard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Between their captures, time enough has elapsed for Fairbanks to discover that he loves Howard's wife and that she loves him. This makes incarceration with Howard intolerable to Fairbanks and he impulsively escapes by cutting a few lines of barbed wire, running to a nearby German airdrome, hitting a mechanic on the chin and flying home. But even in War-time international law operates to extradite civilians and soldiers charged with rape and murder. On the night of Fairbanks' escape, a milk delivery girl was found on the camp grounds raped and murdered. Nearby was Fairbanks' coat and a letter to him from Howard's wife, which is shown to Howard. Soon a German plane drops a note, countersigned by Prisoner Howard, requesting Fairbanks' return. On the front-line a white flag is raised. The Germans raise another, send out two men. The Allied lines send out three, including Fairbanks. In No Man's Land the party engages in chitchat, cigaret-exchanging, and Fairbanks is handed over. At his prison camp trial he refuses to testify, is sentenced to be shot, is saved by the actual murderer's note and suicide. As an adequate finish to this melodramatic tale (adapted from Author Sir Philip Gibbs's novel, Fellow Prisoners), the entire prison camp escapes. Howard, who has given the gentlemanly Commandant (Paul Lukas) his word not to try to escape, tricks the gate guard down from his parapet, kills him with his own gun, mans the parapet machine-gun. Thus covered the other prisoners stampede the remaining guards, bowl over the gates and swarm to the nearby airdrome. All together they fly home while Hero Howard stays at his parapet post until blown up, thus giving his wife to Fairbanks and keeping his word to the Commandant.

Effective in the early sequences in which a brutal commandant tortures the prisoners is the use of yellow color for shots and lamps in night scenes. Ably gloomy is Prisoner Howard's heavy-eyed performance. Remarkably feeble is the comedy relief supplied by a British cockney and a Texas cowboy. Good shot: the escaping mob of prisoners in murky hand-to-hand scrabbling with the airdrome troops.

Ambitious Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who appreciates direction more than most Hollywood actors, last week announced jointly with his famed father that they will play together in three British-made films under the direction of German Director Alexander Korda.

Faithful Heart (Helber). Practically without direction, able husband & wife Herbert Marshall and Edna Best walk desultorily through this British film whose U.S. version has U.S. voices dubbed into the print for some of the minor characters. In a Southampton pub in 1898 a British merchant marine officer (Marshall) seduces a barmaid (Edna Best). Twenty years later he is a post-War Army officer with a rich fiancee and a future when his bastard daughter shows up, a smug young governess (Edna Best). The fiancee pretends to like his daughter but does not discourage her from running away when she decides she is not wanted in her father's home. When Marshall moves to follow her the fiancee poses the essential issue to him: to choose between his 22-year-dead mistress and herself. Thus rationally posed, the problem yields an irrational solution and Marshall pledges allegiance to his dead mistress, abandons his fiancee, embarks on a spiritually incestuous cruise with his daughter.

The direction is so bad that Mr. & Mrs. Marshall, as father and daughter, seem to grin self-consciously at one another. The hero is named Waverly Ango, the heroine Blackie, the fiancee Diana, other characters Miss Gatterscombe and Sir Gilbert Oughterson.

After finishing Faithful Heart on a comparatively small salary, Husband Marshall, now a bigger box-office name than his wife, was scheduled to do another English picture with Jeanette MacDonald. Script difficulty delayed the start until his Paramount contract called him back to Hollywood whence he is setting out this week for Honolulu to do a shipwreck cinema called Four Frightened People, with Claudette Colbert.

With him goes his wife, leaving their three-month-old daughter with Grandmother Best in London. Marshall, now 43, and Edna Best Beard Marshall, now 33, had another wife and husband when they first met several years after the War, she with twin sons, he rickety from War wounds. Before the War, he had failed as an articled clerk, done fairly as a London actor. After the War, both succeeded slowly on the stage as drawing-room characters, he despite a marked limp. After their marriage in 1928 their luck brightened rapidly. Hollywood discovered them two years ago. Marshall's best known pictures were Trouble in Paradise, Blonde Venus, Evenings for Sale.

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