The New Pictures

Moonlight Sonata (Pall Mall) has its soul in Parnassus, its feet in Grub Street. A trite British treatment of cinema's tritest theme, it makes the wobbly point that music hath charms to shoo the city slicker out of the country girl's heart. But what lofts it to the skies for two memorable reels is the piano-playing of 77-year-old Ignace Jan Paderewski, most notable pianist of his time, in cinema a tired old man in a tacky dress suit, a mismanaged bow tie.

In a music hall styled after an interior view of a bunch of bananas, the white-haired pianist who once ruled his native Poland blinks out upon a parquet stage, bows to an effete-looking audience, sits down to play. The camera closes up, revealing a white, death-mask face, eyes shut against the world (and against the World's Fair interior around him), a sparse mustache scraggling over a pursed-up mouth that twitches with tic-like regularity.

As for almost 20 minutes he plays through a Chopin Polonaise and Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, the camera returns again & again to watch his forceful hands. When he has finished, a small child scampers up to him, followed by her parents. He greets them, agrees to play as an encore the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Later, over the brandies, one of those inevitable cough & spit drawing-room pundits quizzes the old maestro on what seemed to him an extraordinary departure from concert-hall form--playing the Sonata as an encore. Quietly. Paderewski starts to explain what the Sonata has meant in the lives of the three he played it for. The camera takes over, tells as prosy a potboiler story as cinema has ever cooked up. The Adventures of Robin Hood

(First National-Warner Bros.). Of old-time Cinemactor Douglas Fairbanks' achievements, perhaps the greatest was his Puckish, jaunty, devil-may-care role of Robin Hood (1922). Replacing Douglas Fairbanks in Robin's bounding buskins is as much of a he-man's job as pinchhitting for Babe Ruth. In the current cinema lithe, lanky Errol Flynn hits no home run. but scores a clean two-bagger standing up. Lacking Fairbanks' punch and ken. he has Robin's form and flair down pat. If prankish Actor Fairbanks was a man's Robin Hood, handsome, romantic Actor Flynn performs for everybody else. A head-thumping, sword-swishing, bow-twanging technicolor attempt to foreshorten the popular episodes of the Soo-year-old saga into the perspective of a single connected story. Robin Hood 1938 makes the last of Richard I's crusading years its period, draws a bead on Regent Prince John's tax oppression that should bring a nod from every liberty-loving Britisher who can afford the admission price after his 27 1/2% income tax is paid. In the course of his swashbuckling defense of human rights. Robin saves Much, the Miller's son (Herbert Mundin). from a poaching charge; fights his way out of bristling Nottingham castle; gets poll-thwacked off a foot-log by doughty Little John (Alan Hale, a veteran of the Fairbanks Robin Hood) and ducked by puddingy Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette), takes the huffy-puffy High Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper) neatly into camp; betters Prince John's best in archery, intrigue and repartee.

Nearly as incredible as the legend of Robin Hood himself, the picaresque story of Errol Thomson Flynn's 29 years nevertheless boils clown to this--that his mettle has come nearer the heat of genuine adventure than any other of cinema's celluloid heroes. Of the same stout Cumberland strain that produced famous Bounty Mutineer Fletcher Christian, Errol is the son of Zoologist Theodore Thomson Flynn, of Queen's University, Belfast. As a child in Ireland he played with Fletcher Christian's sword, knew his 18th-Century cousin's renown from yellowed family documents and a curly-wigged chromo that hung over the mantel. Veteran of three runaway attempts at 13, at 18 he was a member of the 1928 British Olympic boxing team, at 19, "hoofed out" of school in Sydney, Australia, he was sailing the South Sea islands on a "mud ticket" as master of a 20-ton yawl. By the time he was 21, he had made and lost a goldstrike fortune.

Flynn got his first cinema job through a group of film makers who remembered him as a stalwart lad whose boat had taken them on a camera expedition up New Guinea's dangerous Sepik River. The offered role turned out to be that of Fletcher Christian, in a film to be called In the Wake of the Bounty. In an old blond wig ("which made me look like a harlot") he swaggered for a week or so at $5 a day on the poop of a grounded H. M. S. Bounty on rockers. After the completion of the film, the impresario hit upon a great publicity stunt. Errol was called back to meet, fresh off an island steamer, a woolly young native in a seagoing cap and carrying a hand of bananas. To Errol this young Polynesian was introduced as Fletcher Christian of Pitcairn Island, a direct descendant of Mutineer Christian, and Flynn's blood cousin.

Next Flynn got wind of the lucrative "recruiting" racket. A more or less benevolent breed of blackbirders, recruiters do not enslave native boys but cart them away, presumably with parental permission, to work in the gold fields at approximately ten shillings a month. For the recruiter, the bounty is -L-20 a head for boys willing to indenture themselves for three years. Flynn saw to it that most of his boys signed up for three years. He did it with biscuits, teaching the boys to expect one biscuit when he held up one finger, two for two, three for three. When the examining magistrate, required by island law to pass on all indentures, popped the important question, Flynn would gravely hold up three interrogating fingers, was invariably rewarded with almost hysterical assent. When his conscience hurts nowadays, Flynn recalls that many of the boys came out of the bush emaciated, ulcered, unhappy, but after a few months of British guidance could be seen spryly playing football, "healthy as sin."

Vivacious Lady (RKO Radio) guffaws incontinently over the plight of a man (James Stewart) and a maid (Ginger Rogers) who are early to wed but late to bed. The man is a young biology professor, the maid a blonde, high-kicking cafe singer. Flimsy, bedroom-farcey, Vivacious Lady fetches predicaments from afar to eke out its plot to feature length.

Efficiently worded by Scenarists P. J. Wolfson & Ernest Pagano, and played to the last suggestive note by a capital supporting cast of non-star names (Beulah Bondi, Charles Coburn. James Ellison. Frances Mercer. Franklin Pangborn), Vivacious Lady needs only a snipping-out of sophomoric circumstances here & there to bring it to the top comedy class. Most ribald sequence, primed by Director George Stevens to go off in the Hays office's face, comes when Bridegroom Stewart tries to carry Bride Rogers over the threshold of a Pullman drawing room, to find it already occupied by a truculent, long wed pair of grumps.

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