The New Pictures

Meet Nero Wolfe (Columbia). If Author Rex Stout had determined not to let the cinema reproduce any of his American Magazine detective stories he could scarcely have invented a better hero than Nero Wolfe. Wolfe is so sedentary that he never ventures outdoors. His only hobby is growing orchids. Beer-guzzling has given him an enormous paunch. Thus deprived of action and sex appeal, Meet Nero Wolfe overcomes its handicaps surprisingly well, thanks to an effective performance by Edward Arnold and to the presence of Lionel Stander as Wolfe's dazed but tireless assistant.

Wolfe's first cinema assignment is to discover who, by means of a gun concealed in a golf club, with a trigger released by impact with the ball, killed jolly old Professor Barstow and why. By the time he succeeds, the picture has unraveled the grim and interwoven biographies of an irascible golf professional, an Argentine olive oil dealer, a lady idol worshipper and a young man with an Oedipus complex. It has also indicated that its hero, less dashing than Philo Vance and less whimsical than Charlie Chan, but more mercenary than either, will be a highly acceptable addition to the screen's growing corps of private operatives. Good sequence: Wolfe, confronted with a mysterious package that makes an ominous ticking noise, explaining as he unwraps it, how he knows it contains no bomb.

Lionel Stander is a shaggy young Jew of Russo-German descent whose sudden rise to cinematic fame in the past year can be traced, like so many others in Hollywood, principally to a misspent youth. Too independent to follow his father's profession of public accountant, he ran away from school at 14, earned his living for five years as cab driver, lifeguard, reporter, tile setter, office boy, bank clerk. Where an orderly schooling might have refined, this helter-skelter existence served to aggravate the amazing accent of an illiterate Hell's Kitchen ragamuffin which is now his principal financial asset. Stander's first important cinema role was in The Scoundrel (1935). His raucous, angry voice and guttersnipe demeanor stamped him immediately as a new and refreshing type, brought him a Hollywood contract. Since then We're in the Money, Page Miss Glory, If You Could Only Cook, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and six other major pictures have been improved by his unvarying but authoritative version of the Manhattan sophisticate, hoodlum grade.

In private life Lionel Stander is an earnest, reasonably cultured young man whose outstanding physical peculiarity is not his accent but his eyes--one brown, one green. He took up acting after an employer fired him for losing a package of bonds worth $147,000, worked his way up in bit parts on Broadway, directed a stock summer theatre, now has a long contract with Columbia. Last year he was paid $3,100 for acting in a picture in which he said two words ("Two Hearts").

Earthworm Tractors (Warner-First National). Joe E. Brown, as Salesman Alexander Botts, does a good job of proving what a funny thing an eight-wheeled, 80-h.p. jumbo caterpillar tractor really is. He smashes: 1) 40 crates of eggs; 2) several dozen cans of milk; 3) several automobiles; 4) a house; 5) a bandstand, besides mowing down shrubbery and trees. He emerges as a successful tractor salesman by taking deaf and difficult Sam Johnson (Guy Kibbee) for a ride so terrible that Johnson's hearing is restored but Botts's is lost, with the result that he cannot hear Johnson place the order he has sought for seven reels.

Brown's next to last picture for Warner, it ranks with his funniest. Typical gags: Botts pulling Johnson's car to pieces with the Earthworm in an effort to remove it from a swamp; trying to save Johnson the expense of having his house moved by towing it off with the Earthworm to the wrong address, while Johnson inside believes he is passing through an earthquake.

M'liss (RKO) is Bret Harte's famed old novel about Melissa Smith, barmaid Cinderella of the California mine town of Smith's Pocket, dragged down from the shelf now for no better reason than to show that it should have remained there. Wrinkling her woebegone little face into proper expressions--of grief when M'liss' rumpot father (Guy Kibbee) dies; of injured innocence when the mayor threatens to send her to an orphanage; of love when the schoolteacher (John Beal) risks a shy kiss--Cinemactress Anne Shirley, whose rechristening from Dawn O'Day two years ago was an improvement that deserved but did not get an Academy Award, does the best she can but fails to achieve more than a Pyrrhic victory over her material. Typical shot: Lou Ellis (Douglas Dumbrille), poker-playing sophisticate who becomes M'liss' guardian, persuading her to go to school.

Shakedown (Columbia), once called Night Wire, could equally well have been called Hot Lips, Public Enemy or any other title that would indicate that its familiar ingredients are badly jumbled. Edith Stewart (Joan Perry) thinks she is helping her messenger-boy fiance, Bob (Lew Ayres) when she lets herself be kidnapped by Ralph Gurney (Henry Mollison). Gurney turns out to be a rat who really means to hold her for ransom so that he can pay $5,000 to some racketeers. Audiences will come away realizing that they little know what messenger boys have to go through. Silliest scene: Gurney and Edith plotting how to make Bob look like a hero.

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