j. The New Pictures

St. Louis Blues (Paramount) is memorable chiefly for keeping George Raft off the screen and putting Maxine Sullivan's swing rendition of Loch Lomond on it. Raft declined the leading role, that of a Mississippi showboat impresario, because he felt it did not do his talents justice. Paramount promptly suspended him from its pay roll. Miss Sullivan, 4-ft. n-in., gi-lb. Negro soprano, who in 1937 started a craze for gently swung folk tunes, made her Hollywood debut in Going Places last month. In St. Louis Blues, in addition to an excellent rendition of Loch Lomond, she touches a high in good taste for cinemusicomedy by singing the title song without screeching, stamping or keeling up the whites of her eyes.

Since Dorothy Lamour appears in St. Louis Blues, its authors felt obliged to build the suspense around the question of when and how she would get into her inevitable sarong. She does it at night under a hay wagon. Typical shot: Raft's heir to the leading role, Lloyd Nolan, telling Miss Lamour how nice she looks.

Idiot's Delight (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is Producer Hunt Stromberg's version of the play in which Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne delighted New York City theatre audiences three years ago. On the stage, Idiot's Delight presented the fragmentary romance between an itinerant U. S. hoofer and the fake-Russian mistress of a munitions maker, in an Italian border hotel on the eve of a European war. All this added up to an amusing and superficially penetrating indictment of totalitarian politics. Whenever Hollywood touches material of this sort, it stirs up a tremendous agitation about whether or not the cinema will be courageous enough to retain the meaning of the original. In the case of Idiot's Delight, this agitation was augmented by the fact that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after almost deciding that Idiot's Delight was too dangerous to touch, finally not only made it but hired its author, Robert Sherwood, to adapt it himself, and released it just after it had stopped exporting its products to Italy (see col. 1).

But agitations about Hollywood's courage have little to do with the price of eggs. Hollywood not only has no courage but is not concerned with having any. Despite the fact that it will not be shown in Italy anyway, Idiot's Delight goes so far out of its way to avoid insulting Italians as to have its military characters talk Esperanto. The picture indicts nothing except war in general, and does even this halfheartedly. This caution, however, is not due primarily to Hollywood's reluctance to offend, but merely to its intense eagerness to make profits. Author Sherwood, as familiar with the screen as he is with the stage, was well aware that no ideology this side of Heaven is nearly as important to cinema audiences as the spectacle of Clark Gable embracing Norma Shearer for the first time since they both appeared in Strange Interlude (1932). Consequently, he devoted the first three reels of Idiot's Delight to establishing the fact that they had once shared a hotel bedroom in Omaha, Neb., and most of the rest to indicating that they will presently share another. Thus, the most profound problems proposed for cinemaddicts are just how the Hays office chanced to approve the character impersonated by Miss Shearer, and just how inexpertly Gable dances.

The fact that Idiot's Delight has nothing very important to tell its audiences by no means indicates that it is bad entertainment. It is first rate. That Miss Shearer may not be as good as Lynn Fontanne in her part makes very little difference, since most cinemaddicts are in no position to compare them. She does reasonably well, as does all the rest of the cast--with the exception of Burgess Meredith, who is still apparently unable to forget that in 1932 he was somewhat prematurely acclaimed as the Hamlet of 1940. Good shot: Gable, the assistant of a vaudeville mind reader (Laura Hope Crews), trying to conceal from their audience the fact that she is drunk.

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