The New Pictures

The Iron Duke (Gaumont-British) exhibits the Duke of Wellington before, during and after Waterloo. An arch and finicky general, he seems to enjoy himself more at the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels than when discharging his military duties. Nonetheless, when he hears that "Boney" is advancing on the city, the Iron Duke drags himself from the dance floor. He wins the battle calmly, sheds a brief tear for his fallen officers, moves on to Paris to outwit Metternich, the Tsar, Bluecher and the King of Prussia. All this time, he is carrying on a mild flirtation with a young and flighty matron. When the peace of Europe is attended to, Wellington ends his philanderings, returns to London, gives his Eton sons pats on the head and winds up, as is customary for celebrities in cinema surveys of English history, with a pathetic speech in Parliament.

For an elderly and distinguished British actor, eager to be knighted by his King, the business of impersonating heroes in his country's history is eminently sound. The only error made by George Arliss was in choosing two who performed on the same world stage about the same time. In The House of Rothschild (in which Wellington was impersonated by C. Aubrey Smith), Actor Arliss suggested to cinema audiences that Waterloo was a minor crisis in the affairs of a Jewish financier. In The Iron Duke, though Rothschild does not appear at all, Arliss' invariable mannerisms are so reminiscent that it seems strange when he orders his cavalry to charge instead of trying to arrange a merger. Whatever the effect of The Iron Duke may be on Mr. Arliss' ambitions for knighthood, it is likely to be greater than the film's effect upon the U. S. public. Handsome, obsequious and dull, this British picture presents history diluted but not improved by fiction. Liveliest shot: "Boney'' showing Wellington he is no gentleman by shooting at him.

The Gilded Lily (Paramount). A pert Manhattan stenographer named Marilyn David (Claudette Colbert) keeps weekly Thursday night dates on a bench in front of the New York public library with her popcorn-chewing reporter friend Peter Dawes (Fred MacMurray). When her true love, Charles Gray (Ray Milland), sails away without revealing his identity as an English lord, the newshawk exposes the romance on his tabloid's front pages, untruthfully dubs Marilyn as a "no-girl" who spurned British title and fortune. With this publicity Marilyn overnight becomes Manhattan's most notorious and highly paid night-club entertainer. Her career leads her to England, to Charles who has grown blase and selfish, and eventually on a blizzardy night back to the Manhattan bench where she and Peter contentedly munch more popcorn.

A slick, entertaining film of a modern Cinderella, The Gilded Lily moves plausibly through many plot impossibilities with Miss Colbert looking extraordinarily beautiful in chic Travis Banton frocks. Fred MacMurray, onetime jazz-band leader, dark-browed and handsome in his first leading role, is obviously nervous in some scenes but does, on the whole, creditable work and will probably be hailed as Hollywood's new great lover. Pleasantly directed by Wesley Ruggles, this film just misses being a worthy successor to It Happened One Night, to which it will undoubtedly be compared.

Sequoia (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) concerns an abnormal affinity between a deer and a puma who meet in Sequoia National Park, form an allegiance which causes them to behave like the lion and the lamb in the Biblical text. Captured in infancy by a kind-hearted tourist girl (Jean Parker), Gato, the puma, and Malibu, the deer, soon learn to lap from the same dish. They are fast friends by the time Gato's habit of raiding the neighbor's chicken coop makes it necessary for their mistress to turn both loose in the forest.

In their native environment, Gato and Malibu, as might be expected, go about their business separately but their partnership still continues. The first time Gato sees Malibu he prepares to kill him, then recognizes his old crony and shares a drink with him. Both remain attached to Miss Parker. When his mate is killed, Malibu leaves their fawn with her to rear. The villain of Sequoia is a surly poacher named Bergman. When Bergman traps a herd of deer, Malibu shows them how to jump out of the corral. Bergman stalks Malibu and Gato stalks Bergman. Sequoia ends when Gato claws Bergman into a semicoma and Malibu butts him off a cliff.

Adapted from Author Vance Hoyt's Malibu, with the title changed lest cinemaddicts mistake it for a story about Hollywood, Sequoia was extraordinarily difficult to film. Gato and Malibu are natives of Sequoia National Park near Fresno. There Director Chester Franklin. Producer John Considine Jr. and a crew of 40 worked almost two years, made 62 miles of film before they had the 7.500 feet they needed. Most outdoor pictures require a dozen or so different types of lenses. Photographer Chester Lyons used 47 in Sequoia. Pack trains carried film from location to a base camp daily whence it was shipped 300 miles to the studio laboratories to be developed. "Rushes"' returned to the location spot two days later. Though arduous, Sequoia was comparatively cheap to make since its principals, now on tour in cities where the picture will be shown, received only beef and carrots.

Billed as "the story of a strange friendship," the picture is that and something more. A tender, ingenuous poetry pervades its tenuous narrative, produces a unique mood which might have resulted in literature from a collaboration by Ernest Thompson Seton and the late W. H. Hudson. Superficially an unlikely anecdote about two animals, it is really a gentle and persuasive nature lyric, expressing, in a photographic style brilliant enough to make it one of the best pictures of the year, the calm, dangerous mystery of mountains, woods and snow.

Baboona (Martin Johnson). With the possible exception of Manhattan, no section of the world has been exploited for the cinema more thoroughly than Africa. Well aware that the Dark Continent's flora and fauna offered little novelty, Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson, who have spent the last decade taking pictures of it, tried this time to introduce an experimental touch by ''exploring" Africa by air. Equipped with two Sikorsky amphibians, they conducted what seems to have been an eminently pleasant junket, stopping from time to time for close-up views of zebra, cheetah, lion, trout, elephant, man and finally a colony of unscrupulous baboons.

The major fault in most Johnson wildlife studies is that they include too much Johnson, too little wild life. Since the means of travel constitutes the principal news in Baboona, this flaw is more than usually noticeable. No grim study of jungle ferocities and hardships. Baboona is rather the record of a unique vacation. It shows Africa in friendly mood, swarming with gay pygmies, ingratiating birds, responsive game fish. Mount Kenya looks like a Swiss Alp on a postcard. The monkeys scratch themselves with holiday enthusiasm. Only the rhinoceroses are ugly, and even they waddle off with gentle indecision. Good shot: a group of amiable lions lolling around the carcass of a zebra.

Charlie Chan in Paris (Fox). "Perfect case like perfect doughnut--has hole." With this convenient hypothesis to work from, it is no trouble at all for famed Detective Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) to find out who threw a knife at a dancer named Nardi, who killed an unscrupulous bank "cashier, what connection both have with the forged bonds and the man who walks with a crutch. Abetted by his grinning son Lee Chan, he chivalrously establishes the innocence of pretty Yvette Lamartine, dispenses telegraphic proverbs for the benefit of a stupid confrere.

Less ingenious in plot, less eloquent in dialog than most previous Chanecdotes, this one has three qualities to recommend it: Warner Gland's undented black felt hat; a false face which deductive-minded cinemaddicts should include in their speculations; a good shot of the Paris sewers.

Now by far the most famed series in the cinema, Charlie Chan pictures began in 1931 with Charlie Chan Carries On. Since then Chan has carried on in The Black Camel, Charlie Chan's Change, Charlie Chan's Greatest Case, Charlie Chan's Courage, Charlie Chan in London. No longer bothered to invent new titles, Fox will presently release Charlie Chan in Buenos Aires, Charlie Chan in Morocco. Derived from the Saturday Evening Post stories by the late Earl Derr Diggers, the cinema Chan has exhausted the original supply. Now, though Author Diggers' widow receives a royalty on each, Chan's cases and his mottoes are invented for him by Fox scenarists. Almost anyone who is not otherwise engaged around the Fox studio serves as his director. Aside from their central character, Charlie Chan casts contain few notables. Their settings are cheap. They are made in 24 days. They are particularly popular in China, where audiences are grateful for a compatriot who is neither opium-smoker nor hatchet man. Almost all the letters which they arouse are addressed not to Warner Oland but to Charlie Chan.

Most famed contemporary cinema performer of Oriental roles, Warner Oland was born in Umea, Sweden, reared in Boston. He arrived at his current specialty after a long stage career in Ibsen and Shakespearean roles which ended when he made his cinema debut in Jewels of the Madonna, with Theda Bara (1917). Thereafter he played in serials like The Violet Diamond of Daroon. His career as a Chinese started when he played Charlie Yong in East Is West (1922). For his first Chan picture he got $12,500. Now he gets $100,000 for three in a row. In private, although he has lately taken to coining Chinese proverbs, Warner Oland has few Oriental characteristics. He has never visited China, knows no Chinese except those connected with the cinema. Feeble as a detective, he frequently mislays his glasses, gets his wife to find them for him. To look Chinese, he pulls his mustache down at the''sides, tapes his eyebrows, cuts his hair back on his forehead. Because he maintains a copper-colored sunburn, he needs little grease paint. He lives at Carpinteria, Calif., 65 miles from Hollywood, likes dabbling with oil paints, owns a six-year-old Schnauzer named Greta who, attended by a trained nurse and Warner Gland's personal physician, last week whelped eight puppies.

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