The New Pictures

The New Pictures July 14 (Tobis).

Director ReneClair won his first fame with a simple love story. Sous Les Toits de Paris, his second fame and third with brilliant satiric farragos, Le Million and A Nous La Liberte. July 14 is a simple love story of a blonde flower-seller (Annabella) and a taxi-driver (Georges Rigaud). Across the street in the shadow of Montmartre they fall in love on July 13th. They talk in the street, that night go to the street ball after she has lost her job in a cabaret for slapping an old drunkard (Paul Olivier). That night the taxi-driver's wanton, black-haired ex-mistress (Pola Illery) moves in on him and he moves out. When the blonde finds the brunette's clothes in his room next morning, she breaks off with him. While he is dancing that night with the brunette at the street ball, the blonde's mother dies. He falls into the company of thieves, abandon's taxi-driving. But on his first job he finds that the cashier of the wine shop to be robbed is the blonde and he breaks up the burglary. For shielding him she loses her job and the two lose one another again. She meets the old drunk again and he buys her flowers, giving her 2,000 francs. She buys a flower cart. One day in a little square two cabs dodge one another and one hits the cart. The driver is her lover.

This slender story tells of nothing more than the frustration of some small people, their dependence on chance, their suspicious efforts to avoid what is simplest and best for them, their loneliness and the simple decorum of their pleasures. In July 14 Director Clair's chief advance is in further developing and expressing the characters of that small troupe of actors that he has slowly assembled for their humane spontaneity. There is beautiful lively Annabella, half ingenue, half adult, whom he found for Le Million. There is stubborn-mouthed, idealistic Georges Rigaud and Raymond Cordy with the sliding, friendly black eyes, the temper that all his huge patience cannot control, hero of A Nous La Liberte. There is beautiful, sluttish Pola Illery. There is aristocratic Paul Olivier who plays in July 14 one of the funniest drunks ever seen. There are half a dozen marvelous character actors whom Clair uses to fill Frenchmen. French critics found that he had used all this to achieve "poetic aura,' "poetic realism."

Good shots: The street crowd dancing in the drizzle under umbrellas; children running down the hill stairway to get a paper lantern; Raymond Cordy, his taxi bumped from behind, stopping, starting to argue before he gets his head out the window; drunken Paul Olivier terrifying the other patrons of a cabaret by fondling a revolver with a view to suicide, readily giving up to the headwaiter, then pulling a second from another pocket; The final shot from above the deserted street in which wait the abandoned cab and flower cart.

In Rene Clair's stable of actors, designers and technical men, Annabella is the only rebel. On the lot she refuses to work overtime, drives a hard bargain, insists on having her own way. She is the daughter (real name, Suzanne) of Paul Charpentier, editor of the Journal dee Voyage. French director Abel Gance first spotted her and called her Annabella because, in common with most literate Frenchmen, he admires "Annabel Lee," Edgar Allen Poe's poem to his dead wife. Rene Clair brought her fame in Le Million. Night after the first Paris showing, she signed a contract with Osso Films. Last year Clair called her back for July 14. He gets along much better with amiable, unambitious Pola Illery, the Rumanian who plays his strumpets.

Aggie Appleby, Maker of Men

(RKO-Radio). Crossing its fingers behind a burlesqued title, this film is a clumsy attempt to satirize the cinema theme of regeneration. But Director Mark Sandrich and several up-&-coming young actors have an attractively lighthearted time with the heavyhanded script. As Aggie the regenerator Wynne Gibson is a slum beauty weary of the hands of men but wearily willing to go to bed for a night's lodging. Beetle-browed young William Gargan plays Red Branahan, the alley tough who could make a dishonest living if he could ever bring himself to run away from the police. After he has gone to jail for putting two good cops in the hospital, his mistress Aggie, with a celerity only possible in the cinema, meets bis opposite, a precious, rich, bespectacled country boy (Charles Farrell). By throwing away his spectacles, telling him to talk out of the corner of his mouth, giving him the Irish name of her jailed lover, she turns the country poltroon into a man-eater and a construction gang boss, then falls in love with him. The complications arrive late, when the lover gets out of jail and Farrell's coddling aunt and charming fiancee (Betty Furness) come to town. Aggie hands Farrell back to his country fiancee, and embracing man-making as her career, turns on the real Red Branahan and with a few broad strokes sketches him in as a floorwalker in a jewelry store.

Meet the Baron (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is violent slapstick with a holocaust of puns. Comedian Jack Pearl takes the Baron Munchausen role he has played for the past 15 months on the radio. To the comedy of the howling lie, the stooge's skepticism and Pearl's definitive reply, "Vass you dere, Sharlie?" have been added Comedian Jimmy Durante and his masochistic schnozzle; Comedian Ted Healy; and three stooges who by the simple device of tirelessly clouting one another are nearly as funny as the Marx Brothers.

The plot: A real Baron Munchausen, sailing into New York Harbor, cannot appear because he has heard that the husband of his mistress is on board. He exchanges identities with the ship's tailor, Jack Pearl, who promptly takes on a manager, Jimmy Durante. In a rain of ticker-tape, as thousands cheer, the two impostors ride expansively up Broadway. When Pearl recognizes the fundament of his Aunt Sophie who is washing a window, he plunges head-down in the automobile and Durante, with a vulgarity at once extravagantly bold and strangely shy, notes the family resemblance. In a broadcasting studio the fake Baron, innocent of an adventurous past, fakes an outrageous one. His "Vass you dere?" squelches all doubts, hugely amuses his studio audience.

Traveling on to lecture at Cuddle College for girls, Pearl falls in love with a chambermaid, Zasu Pitts. The lovemaking of the strange pair touches a charming note which Director Walter Lang quickly suppresses. A chorus of girl students, Ted Healy and stooges prance energetically through the proceedings. Finally the leal Baron and then Pearl's Aunt Sophie arrive and thoroughly expose the impostors. Miss Pitts, inconsolable, finds her hero is a pants-presser but follows Pearl anyway -- and he is offered a fabulous radio contract. The picture ends with Manager Durante, in a state of wild-eyed, concentrated insanity, dickering with the radio agent about imaginary contract quibbles.

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