The New Pictures

Fools for Scandal (Warner Bros.) cost $900,000, of which harum-scarum Actress Carole Lombard got $150,000, Belgian-born Actor Fernand Gravet $50,000. Less of a drain on the budget was the $25 a day paid for several weeks to cafe society's No. 1 hitchhiker, "Prince" Mike Romanoff (real name: Harry Gerguson). Actor Gravet got his first Hollywood job (The King and the Chorus Girl) year and a half ago because Producer-Director Mervyn LeRoy thought he resembled Edward VIII. Prince Mike got his because there is no one Hollywood appreciates more than a persistent pretender.

But when Fools for Scandal was last week presented to U. S. cinemaudiences, Actor-Prince Mike's lowbrowed, pseudo-Romanoff visage had joined the innumerable faces on the cutting room floor. What remained was more fustian than fun, a pursuit through high & low worlds of a popular, penniless French marquis working his way, via the scullery, into a cinema star's boudoir. In spite of Actress Lombard's strident earthiness, the result is as unearthly as Actor Gravet's French-flavored, concave British inflection, as wooden as Charlie McCarthy--whom Actor Gravet, in claw-hammer coat & starchy shirt front, resembles more than he does Windsor.

After finishing Fools for Scandal, Producer LeRoy, a son-in-law of Triumvir Harry M. Warner, left the family plot for a production berth at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, safe from barbed thrusts about nepotism. Sawed-off, narrow-eyed, cigar-waving Producer LeRoy is still hailed, at 37, as the Boy Wonder. At five he fell three stories in the San Francisco earthquake, landed unhurt on a mattress. At nine, engaged at $2.50 a week in a stage production of Barbara Frietchie to watch for the Rebels from a prop tree, he fell out of the tree, got a raise because audiences liked the variation. After a try at vaudeville singing he got into films, posed as a cameraman, worked as a gagman, then got a chance at directing. As a director he is best at purposeful melodrama (Little Caesar, Five Star Final, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,They Won't Forget), which he usually endows with newsreel clarity, noteworthy ingenuity. In drawing-room comedy his approach is parvenu.

Un Garnet de Bal (Studios Francois I) is as expertly designed and executed a piece of dramatic tapestry as the cinema has woven in many a year. Its pat pattern follows the musing finger of a French widow (Marie Bell) as she traces over the names on the program of her first ball, nearly 20 years ago, then sets out to check up on these beaux of yesteryear.

As one by one she tries to find them again, the camera shows dramatic glimpses into many lives. The first was a suicide for love of Cristine, but lives on in the mind of a grief-mad mother. Another, the one who wooed her in verse, is now a slick crook. The composer (Harry Baur), of whose lyric tribute she was gaily unappreciative, has turned priest. The optimist (Raimu) who was going to be president is mayor of his village, is about to wed his cook. She traces the next to the Marseille water front. There the cameras are literally tilted, and with shrewdly-angled photography emphasize the skidding career of the hagridden, one-eyed, epileptic physician she finds. Back at the scene of the ball, today's reality convinces her that her memories must all have been a lacy dream.

The present disorganized state of France's motion-picture industry is not all to the bad: it gives an imaginative director a completely free hand, unhampered by a big studio overhead, gives him his pick of actors. Available to Director Julien Duvivier (Maria Chapdelaine, Poll de Carotte, Pepe le Moko) were some of France's best known cinemactors. On his theme's eight episodes, eight leading French scenarists collaborated. The result, satisfying to the last photographic and histrionic detail, richly deserves the prize it won abroad (Mussolini Cup, 1937 Venice Biennial Film Exposition), suggests the advisability of a little more disorganization in Hollywood. Following the completion last year of Un Carnet de Bal, Director Duvivier was brought to Hollywood by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, has been assisting Director W. S. Van Dyke with the forthcoming Marie Antoinette.

The Birth of a Baby (The American Committee on Maternal Welfare, Inc.). Prime function of the New York State cinema censors is to keep the cinema fit for children, to guard them from any motion picture that is "obscene, indecent, immoral, inhuman, sacrilegious, or ... would tend to corrupt morals or incite to crime." Last week most New York cinemagoing children knew the modern technique of operating a clip joint, sticking up a bank, or killing a man. Most of them had seen plenty of the ecstasies of dalliance, but none had learned from the cinema how a baby is born.

Since July 1937 the New York censor board has had its heel on The Birth of a Baby, prepared by The American Committee on Maternal Welfare. Inc., representing 16 reputable medical and maternal welfare organizations. It was designed with the hope of bringing to audiences throughout the U. S. a graphic lecture on how to have healthy babies and mothers. Last week New York's Board of Regents, court of appeals in matters of cinema censorship, was reviewing final arguments for the film, hoped to reach a decision fortnight hence. While New York was hemming & hawing, The Birth of a Baby was doing top box-office business in censor-free Minneapolis and St. Paul, had been booked for subsequent showings in 37 Minnesota and Wisconsin theatres.

The Birth of a Baby packs its big punch by following a carefully phrased cinema lecture on prenatal care with a close-up of the actual birth of a girl child. For one breathless minute the camera, with its matchless eye for detail, watches the child's head emerge as the physician moves swiftly to support it, notes an infant arm fling heavenward as it comes into view, shows the physician delivering the child at last from its laboring mother. That such a scene would insure capacity audiences the sponsors were certain. But they were just as sure that every audience drawn to the film would profit from its preachments.

The picture is an absorbing example of dramatic visual education. The film shows the prospective mother going to her physician as soon as she feels sure she is pregnant. During the entire period of gestation she makes regular visits, is periodically examined, kept posted on what to eat, wear, do. At the ninth month, the doctor conducts another examination. The sound equipment picks up what he hears through his stethoscope, brings to the audience the faint beating of the child's heart.

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