The New Pictures

Anna Karenina (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the third cinema version of Count Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece. The first was an ambitious little prodigy by Fox in 1915. The second, called Love and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927, was distinguished by an exhibit of passionate eye-rolling unmatched by anything in his later career on the part of John Gilbert. For these features, the current edition substitutes a thoroughly sane characterization of the hero by Fredric March and a decent, if not altogether unwavering, respect for the intentions of its original. The second and third versions of Anna Karenina still have two important things in common. These are a superb portrayal of Anna by Greta Garbo and a story which, like many masterpieces of the world's literature, could scarcely have been better suited to the purposes of Hollywood if it had been written by six famed screen writers.

The thoughtful and honest adaptation by Screenwriters Clemence Dane, S. N. Behrman and Salka Viertal starts with the meeting of Vronsky and Anna at the railroad station in Moscow. Its major passages are the ball at which Vronsky falls in love with Anna; the spring afternoon in St. Petersburg when she realizes that she is in love with him; the horse race during which, when Vronsky's horse falls, Count Karenin (Basil Rathbone) learns from Anna's expression what she is feeling; the morning, long after she has left her husband, when Anna returns to see her son (Freddie Bartholomew); the day when Vronsky, sick of a relationship which has cut him off from his world, leaves Anna to join his regiment; and the snowy night when Anna goes to the station to say goodby to him and waits alone after he is gone, to kill herself. Largely omitted from all this are the vital secondary themes of the novel, the marriage of Levin (Gyles Isham) and Kitty (Maureen O'Sullivan), the complex affairs of Anna's brother Stiva (Reginald Owen) and his wife (Phoebe Foster). Far more important, however, is what Producer David Selznick and Director Clarence Brown contrived to stretch the limitations of their medium to include: the strong essential melodrama of Anna Karenina's career and the savage, cold and fantastically elaborate background against which her doom is outlined.

Considered as a reproduction of a celebrated novel, Anna Karenina is intelligent, reasonably faithful and less likely to arouse squeals of affected agony from literary hair-splitters than any other recent effort of its kind. Considered on its own merits as a picture, it is the liveliest in which Greta Garbo has appeared since Mata Hari and should on this account delight millions of cinemaddicts who have never of Tolstoy and could not spell out his stories if they had. Good shot: Vronsky's first glimpse of Anna, through steam blowing across her face from the engine of the train.

Page Miss Glory. (Warner Bros.) On Broadway last winter this slight, satiric comedy on the lunacies of the beauty contest and advertising testimonial rackets enjoyed a modest success (TIME, Dec. 10). Eyebrows went up, however, when Warner Brothers paid $72,500, highest price in years, for the stage scripts as the first vehicle for Marion Davies under their management.

As it appears on the screen, the story of two nimble-wits (Pat O'Brien and Frank McHugh) who win a beauty contest with a composite photograph of Harlow, Garbo, Dietrich et al. and then palm off a dowdy chambermaid (Marion Davies) as their "original," turns out to be worth considerably less than the purchase price. Under Director Mervyn LeRoy, whose motto seems to have been "When in doubt, shout," Page Miss Glory becomes the noisiest comedy in months, with only Patsy Kelly as a morose chambermaid and Allen Jenkins as a kidnapper managing to give credible performances.

Redheads on Parade (Fox). Sooner or later the musical cycle which started with backstage stories had to get around to a back-camera story of the making of a musical cinema. In this one, Alan Dinehart is an independent producer who faces ruin until he obtains the backing of Raymond Walburn, manufacturer of Titianola, a red dye for hair. Walburn becomes a producer of pictures partly because of his interest in Dixie Lee, who is in love with John Boles, and partly because of his grudge against Jean Harlow, the leading anti-Titianola influence (who does not appear in Redheads on Parade). Assured that when the picture is finished there will not be a platinum blonde left in the U.S., Walburn puts up $300,000, buys a pair of riding breeches to wear on the set, seeks Dixie's love and battles the wiles of his rival, Herman Bing, manufacturer of Platinola, who also wears riding breeches.

While it is likely that Miss Lee, who in private life is Mrs. Bing Crosby, may prefer the crooning she can hear at home to the throbbing tones of John Boles, she manages her share of the proceedings with considerable verve and a singing voice that does credit to her family. By a strange turn of affairs, after five reels spent in manipulating the affections of Boles and the checkbook of Walburn, Miss Lee is eating dinner in the very tavern where the thug who stole her boss's negative is bragging about his exploit. Best song: I Found a Dream.

Top Hat (RKO). When Hollywood revived musical films three years ago, dancing was monopolized by Director Busby Berkely and his imitators. The height of their inventions was reached in Footlight Parade, which showed a chorus massed to represent the U. S. flag. When Dancer Fred Astaire first appeared in Hollywood, he was deemed too lacking in acting ability and sex appeal to do more than a momentary turn in Dancing Lady, for which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer borrowed him from RKO. That bit made Astaire one of the five biggest box-office names in the industry. Teamed with Ginger Rogers--an almost equally capable comedienne who had been overlooked for years for the same reasons--he has since made an estimated $10,000,000 for the company which had at first been happy to lend him to its competitors. Finally, thanks more to Fred Astaire than any other single influence, the character of musicomedy in the cinema has now completely changed.

In Top Hat, Dancer Astaire obligingly continues to offer cinemaddicts an inventory of the proficiencies which made him a stage star for ten years before civilized dancing reached the cinema. The picture contains a dance on a sanded rug, designed as a lullaby for the lady (Ginger Rogers) who lives on the floor below and who has gone upstairs to complain about the tap-dance that preceded it; an elaborate routine with male chorus, copied from one Astaire did in Smiles in 1930; a pretentious "Piccolino," which may or may not turn out to be the "Continental" of 1935-36. Possibly more ingratiating than any of these is an informal scene reminiscent of their best, in Roberta, showing Rogers & Astaire caught in a thunderstorm, arguing with each other by dancing.

The music which accompanies these exercises, all by Irving Berlin, contains such likely hits as Top Hat, White Tie and Tails; Cheek to Cheek and Isn't This a Lovely Day. The story shows Astaire as the U. S. star of a London revue trying hard to further a romance which begins when he keeps Miss Rogers awake and which is impeded only by her stubborn and illogical belief that he is her best friend's husband. Otherwise pleasantly negligible, the narrative has at least the merit of giving a cast of skilled comedians (Edward Everett Horton, Helen Broderick, Erik Rhodes and Eric Blore) a chance to be amusing when Astaire & Rogers are out of breath.

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