The New Pictures

The Story of a Cheat (Serge Sandberg). A frowzy middle-aged gentleman sits down in a Paris cafe, orders a drink and begins to scribble in a notebook. As he writes, he reads aloud or chats, sometimes with the waiter, sometimes with his neighbors at nearby tables. Meanwhile, the screen unrolls aloud the narrative he is telling. It begins as the story of a little boy who was punished, for stealing five pennies, by not being allowed to have mushrooms for dinner. The mushrooms were poisonous toadstools and his whole family of eleven died that night from eating them. "The disaster was beyond my years," says the narrator. "Grief for one at a time, yes. But eleven all at once--I hate to say it but I didn't know where to begin." If it failed to make him sad, the narrator continues, the incident at least enabled him to form an opinion of life. It was a low opinion, but subsequent events did nothing to change it. He became successively a bellhop, an elevator boy, a croupier, a soldier, a jewel thief, a card sharp. Women came and went: the countess in the hotel at Monte Carlo, a beautiful blonde burglar, the wife who won consistently at roulette until he married her, then lost just as steadily. (During the course of his tale, an old lady enters the cafe and sits next to the frowzy storyteller. He recognizes her for the Monte Carlo countess, but tries to prevent her from recognizing him.) From cardsharping, he continues, he made the sorry error of turning to mere gambling and lost his hard-won savings in honest play. Poor again, he found work in a playing card factory but lost his job because he marked the cards. (At this point the Monte Carlo countess picks him up, suggests that now, since he is elderly and poor, the narrator might wish to become her accomplice in a little genteel safecracking. "Countess," says the narrator, "confide in me no longer. My new calling protects me from all temptation. I am a private detective.") Written, adapted, directed, spoken and in large part acted by Paris' famed Sacha Guitry, told with no other sound but the forlornly witty monotone of the narrator, The Story of a Cheat is a neat, simple and wholly successful cinematic experiment. Made in Paris 18 months ago, awarded prizes all over Europe since then, its U. S. showing was delayed by price difficulties. Last week, with English titles by John Erskine, it finally opened at Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Playhouse, got reviews enthusiastic enough to justify nationwide showing in small theatres. Good shot (a characteristic Guitry tour de force) : the narrator exhibiting the series of disguises by which he was accustomed to fool hotel detectives.

That Certain Age (Universal) is another installment of the somewhat prolonged alleluia to adolescence which Deanna Durbin began in Three Smart Girls and has since continued in One Hundred Men and a Girl and Mad About Music. As explicitly stated in the title song, its somewhat debatable premise is that human existence reaches its peak with the first eccentric stirrings of adult sexual drives. As proof, That Certain Age cites the acute case of hero worship induced in its heroine, 15-year-old Alice Fullerton (Deanna Durbin), by an encounter with a blase war correspondent (Melvyn Douglas) of her father's newspaper chain. No sooner does he arrive to occupy the Fullerton guest house than Alice begins scribbling moonstruck entries in her diary, snubs her Boy Scout puppy-love (Jackie Cooper), withdraws from her role in a children's play and tries to talk her parents into letting her wear a grownup evening dress.

It takes the combined efforts of her father (John Halliday), mother (Irene Rich) and the embarrassed correspondent to effect a cure, evidenced when Alice resumes her role in the play and sings Delibes' Daughters of Cadiz.

The cinema's ablest specialist in roles of school-age girls since Mary Pickford was in her heyday, Deanna Durbin has a thoroughly mature soprano voice. Almost equally important, however, is her unique ability to make material which might be either saccharine or morbid seem not only wholesome but reasonably pleasant. There are times in That Certain Age when Miss Durbin's blitheness is a shade less winsome than wincemaking, but in general she comports herself as well as could be expected between songs, sings as brilliantly as usual. Good shot: seven-year-old Juanita Quigley, as the loyal little sister of Alice Fullerton's jilted Boy Scout, reading him portions of the Fullerton diary.

There Goes My Heart (Hal Roach-United Artists). They meet while the heiress, playing hooky from a tyrannical grandfather, is working incognito as a salesgirl in one of her own department stores. While this may not in itself set an altitude record for flights of fancy, its effect upon a story formula worn thin by endless repetition is amazingly beneficial. It permits Joan Butterfield (Virginia Bruce), while investigating how the other half exists, to enjoy the educational experience of living with a colleague named Peggy O'Brien (Patsy Kelly), whose boy friend (Alan Mowbray) is a subway motorman by profession and a mail-order chiropractor by avocation. It causes her romance with a reporter (Fredric March) to develop at a skating rink, where she wins a goldfish bowl in a hilarious game of musical chairs, and to approach fruition in the piquant seclusion of his shabby beach house.

First of a series of four pictures which Producer Hal Roach has scheduled for release under his new distributing contract with United Artists, There Goes My Heart appears to presage a happy renaissance not only for his company but for two round-faced onetime stars who appear in it. Rescued from oblivion by small supporting roles are Nancy Carroll, pert redhead of early talkies, and Harry Langdon, famed silent comedian.

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