The New Pictures

Happy Landing (Twentieth Century-Fox), is blonde, Figure Skater Sonja Henie's third motion picture, makes it clear that Producer Darryl Zanuck must soon find some other way of keeping Miss Henie's films fresh than by putting them on ice. To give Sonja presentable, even spectacular, settings in which to display her twinkling, silver-bladed eurythmy is a set designer's holiday. But to blend a plot with her icebound talents is something not even a Zanuck budget seems to be able to accomplish. Happy Landing makes Miss Henie a million-dollar sideshow on a cheapskate circuit.

There is a promise of topical trippery when Don Ameche and Cesar Romero set off across the Atlantic in a plane loaded with a buoying cargo of ping-pong balls (a device actually adopted by Crooner Harry Richman & Aeronaut Dick Merrill; TIME, Sept. 14, 1936, et seq.). And there is a promise of native warmth when the plane plops down in the midst of peasant festivities in a Norse village. But neither promise is kept. Just as soon as they artfully can, the script writers haul the characters back to the familiar Manhattan night-club surroundings, and thenceforth the picture proceeds through the high & hackneyed jinks of a machine-made plot. Ethel Merman sings with her usual lid-off verve, like a hotcha stenographer at a house party, and skates a little bit. Ameche and Romero spark like worn-out cigaret lighters. A swing quintet, headed by Raymond Scott, tears into something called the War Dance of the Wooden Indians. And Sonja, hovering on the outer edge, looks on with bland, pudgy good nature, putting in a word here & there in excellent parrot English, and probably wondering, in Norwegian, what to do until the ice freezes again.

For Happy Landing Sonja Henie received $80,000, bringing her cinema earnings for three pictures to $210,000. On the well-based belief that Sonja Henie is showing the biggest box-office appeal since Charlie Chaplin, Producer Zanuck has contracted to pay her $125,000 each for next season's three pictures.

This week, while Happy Landing played five times a day at Manhattan's 6,000-seat Roxy Theatre, Sonja herself was spending at least 35 minutes a night for five nights in her Hollywood Ice Revue on the broad ice patch of Manhattan's Madison Square Garden (TIME, Jan. 17). From her personal appearances, which began last month in Chicago and will close late next month in Miami on an especially constructed rink, her net earnings will approximate $200,000.

Spirit of Youth (Grand National). Smart Producer Lew Colder signed up Joe Louis to make a picture for $15,000, right after Louis had beaten Welsh Tommy Farr in his first defense of his world's heavyweight championship. By the time Joe reached Hollywood, Producer Golder had collected a dusky crew of professionals from downtown Los Angeles, planned an all-Negro story that would more or less parallel the Brown Bomber's shuffling clamber to fame. Taking on a wonderful waxworks-plus-minstrel-show quality from its principal player, Spirit of Youth will certainly not be duplicated for many a moon.

The picture (in which Joe Louis is called Joe Thomas) starts in an Alabama neighborhood very like Joe's native Buckalew Mountain country, dubbing in an 11-year-old pickaninny named Anthony Scott who bears a miniature resemblance to Joe in hue, texture and fungus-lipped impassivity, starts up a romance with a girl named Mary (who looks strikingly like Marva Trotter, the girl Joe really married), which causes Joe no end of embarrassment when he comes into the picture himself later. His cinema father, as Joe's was in real life, is a helpless invalid.

Joe Louis first made headlines when he won the light heavyweight championship in Chicago's Golden Gloves tournament. Thomas discovers his fistic ability while smashing baggage and a fellow baggagesmasher. Thomas, like Louis, is knocked out once on his way to the heavyweight championship. But nothing has been released by Louis' pressagent to give any color to the sequences in which Flora, a high yellow temptress, nearly gets Joe Thomas down for a long count, luring him into her night club, hailing him lyrically as "my magic lover," beseeching him to "hypnotize me, mesmerize me in your magic arms." Flora's foiled plot is to tear Joe down a little, vary the monotony of victory so her crooked pals can get better odds.

In the ring sequences, Joe blasts away several opponents, experiencing significant difficulty with the film's champ, Mickey McAvoy, a Max Schmeling sparring partner. As an actor, Joe Louis remains his historically inarticulate self and the world's champion heavyweight.

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