The New Pictures

100 Men & a Girl (Universal). Year ago when Universal Pictures Corp. was on bankruptcy's brink, "Uncle Carl" Laemmle sold it to a group of Manhattan bankers headed by John Cheever Cowdin, who knew as much about the cinema as "Uncle Carl" knew about banking. But their first production, Three Smart Girls (TIME, Dec. 21), was a box-ofifice hit, introducing Deanna Durbin, most promising cinema songstress in years. Last week in her second picture, her first starring role, Songstress Durbin underlined the fact that in her Universal had found its most valuable property and an A-1 box-office attraction.

Audiences like Deanna Durbin for her negative virtues almost as much as for her positive good points. Negatively, she pleases by her lack of the arch, smarty, claphands affectations which have blighted so many Hollywood juveniles in the bud. Positively, she has a clear, appealing soprano, a plump and pleasant face, a buxom 14-year-old physique. In 100 Men & a Girl, as the daughter of an impoverished trombonist (Adolphe Menjou) who is trying vainly to get a job in Stokowski's orchestra, Miss Durbin finds her way without pathetic bumbles through some pretty sentimental sequences. She collects an orchestra of 100 out-of-work musicians, friends of her father's, finally prevails on Stokowski himself (in person) to conduct her 100-man orchestra in a grand finale concert.

Co-Star Leopold Stokowski makes a somewhat wooden actor when he is caught off his podium, but with his feet on their accustomed ground he gives a spirited imitation of Stokowski facing the music. That it is an imitation is largely owing to the technical complications involved in the making of musical films. The orchestral music in 100 Men & a Girl was actually played in Philadelphia by Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded in eight sound tracks instead of the usual one. The orchestra men who appear on the screen are simply Hollywood musicians going through the motions, with Stokowski presiding majestically over the vacuum. Deanna Durbin went East to record her songs before a single scene had been shot on the Universal lot.

Apparently still unspoilt, Deanna Durbin offstage has the normal 14-year-old girl's fondness for intolerant sentiments, for primly precocious phraseology. She has announced that she will "probably never marry." Asked whether she would like Clark Gable as her leading man. she replied: "Why, I admire Mr. Gable's acting very much, but I believe the choice of a leading man depends on whether or not he is suitable for the role."

Mayerling (Nero Film) takes its title from the Austrian hunting lodge where on a cold morning of January 1889, the heir to the Habsburg dynasty was found shot with his young and tolerably beautiful mistress, the Baroness Marie Vetsera. All those within scrutiny were sworn to life secrecy by the Emperor Franz Joseph, who issued the fiat that the pair had committed double suicide, and the incident was the subject of an official dossier inflammable enough to be excluded finally from the State archives. In the less combustible medium of celluloid, the Mayerling mystery is simplified into a classic denouement to a beautiful friendship.

In life, the Archduke Rudolf was a rake and good amateur naturalist, organized a historical survey of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was rated as a dangerous radical for his anticlerical views. In the person of Charles Boyer he is represented as a handsome neurotic, ridden by court ceremonial, badgered by his father's spies, obstructed from netting the fluttering virginity of a beautiful child Baroness (Danielle Darrieux). Following the type of all well-bred monarchical romances, the Prince enjoys himself most when sharing incognito the simple pleasures of the poor. At the Prater, he spends an idyllic evening at the Punch-&-Judy show, throwing hoops round the necks of swans. Ordered next night to a command performance of the opera, he sees his dreamgirl, a shy debutante, take her mother's box for the first time. By secret assignations they share many a trystful profile, give U. S. audiences ample reason to applaud Danielle Darrieux's Dresden-china features. The young Baroness' mother hears of the affair, packs the girl off to forgetfulness in Trieste, where she pines for her rakish Rudolf, finally returns to him. In the hopeless hideaway of his hunting lodge, their story ends.

Directed by Anatole Litvak with a sort of unflagging belief in third-rate melodrama, Mayerling is helped toward verisimilitude by the accuracy of its baroque Viennese trimmings, and by the excellent representational music of Arthur Honegger. More serious cinemagoers, however, may wish that the story had come a little closer to grips with human fact, if only by cribbing the moral that Playwright Maxwell Anderson set to the tale in his Masque of Kings last winter: that to rule brutalizes. The Lower Depths (Albatros). Maxim Gorki, literary darling of the Russian masses both before and after the revolution, wrote The Lower Depths in 1902 to show the disease, despair and degradation of human beings at the bottom of Russia's Tsarist pile. Gorki's pre-Soviet cellarful of morbid, introspective thieves, drunkards and derelicts has been brought to the screen by France's Director Jean Renoir (Madame Bovary, Toni), son of the impressionist painter. In a foreword he announces his film as "human" rather than specifically Russian drama. For realistic squalor and decay Renoir copied the 1936 slums of Villeneuve-la-Garenne, Paris suburb.

Pepel (Jean Gabin), a handsome thief, lives in a basement flophouse run by a receiver of stolen goods, Kostylev (Vladimir Sokoloff) and his wife Vassilissa (Suzy Prim), Pepel's mistress. Other muttering, miasmal inmates are: an alcoholic actor, a streetwalker addicted to reading sentimental novels aloud, and a genuine bankrupt baron who abandons his palace to live in filth. Threatened by the police, Vassilissa attempts to force her pretty little sister Natacha (Junie Astor) to marry a pudgy, petty official. In a resulting brawl old Kostylev is killed and Pepel goes to jail. A new ending, wildly out of key, but approved in script form by Gorki before his death in 1936, has Pepel mysteriously out of prison walking hand in hand with Natacha down a country road, silhouetted as radiantly as any triumphant Hollywood couple.

Cinemamateurs who like to think that foreign films are invariably superior to the domestic brand will be surprised if not chagrined to learn that The Lower Depths won France's Young Independent Critics' prize as Best Film of the Year, brought its director Renoir a knighthood in the Legion of Honor.

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