The New Pictures

Little Women (RKO). A scene in which four adolescent girls dressed in too many petticoats cluster around their mother and tearfully promise to obey their absent father's admonition to behave like little women does not sound like one which would excite a contemporary U. S. cinema audience. Neither does one in which the same four are to be seen squeaking and yapping near their Christmas breakfast table, out of enthusiasm for the idea of presenting their sausages to the poor family down the road. The charm that surrounds such episodes in this picture springs from the delicate and understanding humor with which Director George Cukor translated Louisa May Alcott's 65-year-old semi-classic into the cinema, a humor that becomes richer and sadder as the four heroines grow up. Small Beth March (Jean Parker), still the nicest of the four sisters, goes into a lingering and wistful decline. Romantic Meg (Frances Dee) decides not to marry, changes her mind, has twins. Amy (Joan Bennett) learns to manipulate her "vocabilary" and consoles Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) for falling unsuccessfully in love with her sister Jo. Jo (Katharine Hepburn), from a wild tomboy, develops into a moody, temperamental, tender-hearted girl, saddened by a sense that life is escaping her. Then one rainy winter day the German professor (Paul Lukas) who fell in love with her in New York comes to the March house and proposes to her, under an umbrella at the front door, stammering about "a full heart and these empty hands." By this time the March girls and their mother (Spring Byington), their tyrannical aunt (Edna May Oliver), the boy next door and his gruff uncle (Henry Stephenson) have long since ceased to be figures in an animated period cartoon. They and the snug New England town in which they live, touched by the sentimental melancholy which surrounds things that happened long ago, have become as real as people and places in the cinema can ever be.

That Little Women attains so perfectly, without seeming either affected or superior, the courtesy and rueful wisdom of its original is due to expert adaptation by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, to Cukor's direction and to superb acting by Katharine Hepburn. An actress of so much vitality that she can wear balloon skirts and address her mother as "Marmee" without suggesting quaintness, she makes Jo March one of the most memorable heroines of the year, a girl at once eager and puzzled, troubled, changing and secure.

This picture, which critics last week pronounced the best that RKO has yet produced, is likely to place Katharine Hepburn, who last week left Hollywood to appear on the Manhattan stage in Jed Harris's production of The Lake, near the top of the list of U. S. box-office favorites. Good shots: Jo March running, with long awkward steps, across the snow, after she has paid her first call on Laurie; explaining to Laurie that she cannot dance with him because there is a patch on the back of her dress which people would see if she stood up; teaching Amy how to faint for amateur theatricals, with a fine disregard for ensuing bumps; listening at the door when she hears her Professor Bhaer playing the piano.

Design for Living (Paramount). Working on the theory that stage dialog, no matter how bright in a theatre, is never suited to the cinema, Director Ernst Lubitsch started his adaptation of Noel Coward's comedy by having it completely rewritten. In Ben Hecht's version, the only Coward line that remains is "It's good for our immortal souls"--Tom's dubious comment on the brandy which he and George (Gary Cooper) are drinking to console themselves when Gilda (Miriam Hopkins) has left them both to marry a booby from the advertising business. As refashioned to suit actors whose needs and talents are different from those of Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne and Author Coward, and to placate censors who are less likely than stage audiences to regard sexual eccentricity as a satisfactory solution for social problems, Design for Living emerges in the cinema as a flip, quick-witted euphemism, ending in ambiguity instead of on a sofa.

The first time Tom (Fredric March), George and Gilda make an agreement to form a triumvirate with "No Sex" included, their plan crumbles when George and Gilda set up housekeeping in a Paris flat, collapses when Tom reappears. When a year later Tom and George together rescue Gilda from one of her husband's appalling parties, they renew their contract with curiosity rather than confidence. Even more masterly as a tour de force than its original, Design for Living is almost as well acted. Hecht's lines, as glib as Coward's, lack only a little of their sparkle because they reflect less glittering situations. Good shot: March, dictating a letter to his friends to tell them about his London success as a playwright, stopping when he gets a telegram signed by both of them.

Eskimo (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a report of goings-on in the snowfields, some naive, some sophisticated, but almost all unusual, spectacular, disturbing. Most enthralling sequences are those which exhibit: its hero, Mala, engaged in hunting a whale, which nearly upsets his boat with it's tail; dignified walruses which almost succeed in gnashing him with their tusks; caribou, of which a herd stampedes through a valley, over a hill, across a beach and into the water, where Mala and his companions harpoon them. There are, also, less healthy exercises to be seen in Eskimo--lust, murder, polygamy. Mala makes the mistake of lending his wife to a Nordic fur-trader who gets her tipsy, rapes her and then allows her to shuffle off across the snow where his assistant shoots her under the pardonable delusion that she is a seal. For harpooning the fur-trader Mala becomes fair prey for two members of the Canadian Mounted Police. They inveigle him to their outpost by treacherous subterfuges. Mala breaks out of their handcuffs, starts home to the two new wives a friend has lent him, eating the members of his dog team as he goes. The police finally catch up with him but are by this time so impressed by Mala's. fortitude that, instead of shooting him, they let him escape on a cake of drifting ice. They are under the impression that the ice cake will reach some port of safety but to U. S. audiences it seems that Mala is headed directly for what the picture calls "the last Igloo." At once an exciting travelog and a threadbare melodrama. Eskimo is typical Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer nature lore, solemn, lively, expensive. Most exciting shot: Mala, when he has eaten his last husky, lying down on the snow in order to attract a hungry wolf, which he chokes to death, tears apart for supper.

William S. Van Dyke (Trader Horn, White Shadows of the South Seas, Tarzau the Ape Man, The Prizefighter and the Lady), is the director whom Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer assigns regularly to nature stories or, by analogy, pictures with leading men like Johnny Weissmuller or Max Baer. For Eskimo, he and a staff of 42 assistants including Chef Emile Ottinger of Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel spent $1.500,000 and nine months on location at Teller, Alaska, 100 mi. below the Arctic Circle. Less courageous than they appear to be in the picture, the Eskimo extras whom Van Dyke hired at $5 per day ran away after seeing their first cinema. It showed a fight and they thought that if Director Van Dyke had been as sympathetic as he pretended, he would have helped instead of taking pictures.

Principal difficulty in making Eskimo were the three hunting scenes. The seasons for whale, walrus and caribou are the same but Alaskan Eskimos hunt them in different places. Director Van Dyke hustled from one hunting ground to another by plane. Mala is an Eskimo but not a wild one. He turned up two years ago in Hollywood to be a cameraman, joined the Van Dyke expedition as guide, photographed so well that Van Dyke decided to make him the hero. Most of the whites in the cast are members of Van Dyke's technical crew. The fur-trader is Peter Freuchen, who wrote the book on which Eskimo is based. Van Dyke himself is a police inspector. When he came back to Hollywood last spring with 600,000 feet of film, Director Van Dyke brought along a dozen Eskimos for interior sequences. They endured Hollywood for six months, hurried North when their supply of canned reindeer meat gave out.

Blood Money (Twentieth Century), contrived as a vehicle to bring George Bancroft back to the screen after an absence of 18 months, is a mildly exciting little treatise on the bail bond racket. Its hero, Bill Bailey (Bancroft), is a bluff bondsman who gets into difficulties with his underworld associates when, to pay back a bank thief for stealing his girl, he makes less sympathetic arrangements than usual. It is notable less for Bancroft's contribution than for its villainess (Frances Dee), a pretty, well-mannered debutante who is also a masochist, a kleptomaniac and an exhibitionist. Good shot: Miss Dee hurrying off to investigate an advertisement for models, in the hope that the advertiser will attack her.

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