The New Pictures

We're Going to be Rich (Twentieth Century-Fox). Since a British comedienne named Gracie Fields has for the past few years been the reputedly highest paid cinemactress in the world, U. S. cinemaddicts may wonder: 1) why Fields pictures have never been exhibited in the U. S.; 2) why British audiences find her so funny. This first of three Fields pictures which Twentieth Century-Fox plans to make in its Pinewood studios, begs the first question but answers the second. An uproarious, rough & tumble comedy about life before the turn of the Century in the gold camps of South Africa, it displays its star as one of the most likable characters on the screen, suggests that in failing to recognize her long ago, Hollywood has been guilty of serious nonfeasance.

Almost as familiar as boy-meets-girl is the cinema situation in which Victor McLaglen fights with an adversary less cumbersome but much cleverer than himself. While Dobbie (McLaglen), a hulking, happy-go-lucky prospector, endures prolonged humiliation at the hands of an up & coming gambling-house proprietor (Brian Donlevy), his wife Kit (Gracie Fields) supports him and her moppet nephew by pursuing her profession of music-hall artiste.

Director Monty Banks and a heterogeneous cast of minor actors have imparted energy, humor and color to a riotous flow of incident. We're Going to be Rich, however, is made really tops by the superb assurance--acquired before innumerable real audiences in London and provincial theatres--with which Miss Fields does her specialties. High point of the picture: the Fields rendering of a Boer folk song, Vat Jon Goed en Trek, Ferreira (Pack Up and Go, Ferreira), as a request number in a Johannesburg dive.

Rated by almost any standard, Gracie Fields is the world's most successful show-woman. She makes about $750,000 a year; $250,000 a picture, $5,000 a week when touring England in vaudeville, the rest from broadcasting and royalties on gramophone records, which sell a million a year. Far more extraordinary than her income is her popularity. Answering her fan mail costs $25,000 a year. In an average week, she gets 500 requests to open bazaars, beauty contests, etc., 350 a week to read new plays, thousands a week to launch new songs. In London, Gracie Fields sometimes stops traffic, but on tour, whole towns turn out when she arrives and she rides through mobbed streets, shouting, singing, waving her hands.

In the U. S., cinema stars belong to a social class of their own which has no equivalent in England. This does not inconvenience Gracie Fields who prefers to live in a style more in keeping with her humble origins. In London, her most ostentatious possession is a red brick house on Finchley Road. She sold her Rolls-Royce because "it was too posh for me,'' rides in a Buick.

Daughter of a poor Rochdale. Lancashire engineer. Gracie Fields left school before she could read and write fluently, spent a good deal of her childhood working as a cotton-winder at $3.75 a week, got into vaudeville, trouped for a shilling a week and keep. In 1916, when she was 18, she made her first hit in a play called It's a Bargain with Archie Pitt whom she married seven years later. In 1918, she began appearing in Mr. Tower of London. The show speedily became so famous that audiences got into the habit of chorusing the jokes with the star, and the Gracie Fields era in the British theatre began in earnest.

On the stage, Gracie Fields is, if possible, less pretentious than in her private life. In We're Going to be Rich, her comedy technique was polished up for U. S. audiences. In British music halls it is characterized by flea-scratching gestures, homely grimaces, broad Lancashire dialect.

For holidays, Gracie Fields usually goes to Capri where she has a villa. In England, her interests outside of work are movies, bicycles, orphans. She maintains a private asylum with 50 inmates near Brighton, has several sand piles and swings in her garden for the convenience of visiting children. In 1937 she visited Hollywood where most of the screen nobility had never heard of her. She rode in sight-seeing busses, spent two weeks on the desert with Joan Crawford, bought herself a cowgirl outfit and spent a whole day with Shirley Temple. Said Gracie: "I like me own country better."

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (Warner Bros.) unfolds the case history of one of the most engagingly alarming characters in the crime annals of the screen: an eccentric medico who, to satisfy his personal curiosity about the physiological aspects of a life of crime, undertakes to lead one. Dr. Clitterhouse (Edward G. Robinson) begins innocuously enough by pilfering a few trinkets from the jewel boxes of socialite friends. When he sets out to dispose of his loot, he finds himself involved with a gang of burglars whose less objective motives complicate the research project. Eventually Dr. Clitterhouse feels obliged to experience in person the excitement of what he describes as "the ultimate crime," at the expense of the gang's leader (Humphrey Bogart). This brings his clinical experiments to a conclusion all the more startling because it presents a murderer as a sympathetic character.

Like Barre Lyndon's play from which it was neatly adapted by John Wexley and John Huston, The Amazing Dr. Clitter house is a hard piece of work to pigeon hole. Although it is not psychological drama, fantasy nor plain whodunit, it is all three by turns and first rate entertainment throughout. Good shot: Dr. Clitter house inspecting the vocal chords of a neurotic young thief (Allen Jenkins) who loses his voice in moments of professional excitement.

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