The New Pictures

Millions in the Air (Paramount) is another picture about radio amateur hours. In it the girl (Wendy Barrie) is a rich soap-maker's daughter who attempts the amateur hour to convince people she has talent as a singer. The boy (John Howard) is an ice cream vendor who successfully sings a duet with her but bridles when he learns her identity. The tedium of this is relieved by a small, able, comely tap dancer named Eleanore Whitney, Dave Chasen as a one-man band, and Willie Howard, whose great ambition is to sing "La Donna e mobile'' from Rigoletto without being forcibly stopped.

Whipsaw (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) embodies the ultimate variations in what can be done with a G-man (Spencer Tracy) keeping tabs on a girl (Myrna Loy) with whom he falls in love. She has the Koronoff pearls in the handle of the mirror of her dressing-case set, but does not know it. They have been planted there by one of two gangs of thieves competing for them. Including scenes in London, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and New Orleans the double-headed chase goes rollicking along in steamboats, planes and hired automobiles.

Like The Thirty-Nine Steps and Hands Across the Table, Whipsaw belongs to that new category of cinemas in which a man and a girl, though traveling together or sharing the same domicile like husband & wife, cannot sleep together because 1) they are not married, and 2) their character or occupation makes it impossible.

In Whipsaw the hero and heroine are kept out of the same bed because Tracy believes Miss Loy is involved in a robbery, and it is therefore his duty to treat her as a Federal operative must treat any subject under surveillance; because Miss Loy knows that Tracy, in spite of his pose as a fellow criminal, is really a sleuth. Dialog wavers back & forth between flippant, Grade A exchanges between Miss Loy and Tracy, and sad C-minus stretches where the crooks make remarks like, "We're hep to the whole layout."

Love finally blossoms in a farmhouse where Miss Loy and Tracy, stranded by a storm, help the farmer's wife through the ordeal of bearing twins. Even quintuplets would not have made Whipsaw important, but Myrna Loy's charm and Tracy's skillful underplaying are assets that no picture can have and be bad.

Best shot: a beauty-parlor operator reacting to the fear that she will be charged for a customer's long-distance call.

Scrooge is a British version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, released for the U. S. Christmas trade by Paramount. A properly mean, frowzy, waspish Scrooge (Sir Seymour Hicks), a fine, spindly-legged Bob Cratchit (Donald Calthrop), a frail, treble-voiced Tiny Tim, and a number of thoroughly capable minor actors move through snowy London streets and warm Early Victorian interiors. Projected with tenderness but without sentimentality are the sequences showing the rousing Christmas of the Cratchit family. Good shot: Cockney harridans cackling over the belongings of the dead Scrooge in the Christmas-yet-to-come.

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