The New Pictures

Each Dawn I Die (Warner Bros.-First National) winks at the Hays Code, which frowns on teaching cinemaddicts how to commit crimes, by illustrating a practically foolproof way to commit one. When Frank Ross (James Cagney), a fresh reporter, presses too close to the racketeers running his home town, the boys slug him, douse him with whiskey, prop him behind the steering wheel of a car and head it toward a crowded intersection. The result starts Jimmy off on a long term for manslaughter and gives Fellow Prisoner Hood Stacey (George Raft) his opportunity to meet "the first really square guy I've ever known." It also touches off the most authentic and exciting prison picture since The Big House (1930), one of the noisiest sound tracks ever heard outside an airplane epic, enough slugging, shooting, bullyragging and brutality to make the most hardened criminal think twice before tangling with the law.

In addition to its crackling screen play (by Norman Reilly Raine and Warren Duff from Jerome Odium's novel), its sharp camera eye (Warners' Director William Keighley), Each Dawn I Die is made memorable by the easy mastery of its two principals. Cinemactors Cagney and Raft, the screen's two deadliest Ruffie MacTuffies, have been friends ever since they began their careers as vaudeville hoofers in Manhattan in the 205. Cagney was responsible for one of Raft's earliest cinema parts, a dancing bit in Cagney's Taxi. Their appropriate reunion, also celebrating their return to the gangster movies where they belong, is a fierce slugfest in handcuffs.

Winter Carnival (United Artists-Walter Wanger). Ann Sheridan, born Clara Lou Sheridan in Dallas, Tex. 24 years ago, left college for Hollywood when she won a Paramount "Search for Beauty" contest in her neighborhood in 1933. After two years on the Paramount payroll, during which she failed to set any celluloid on fire, she was dropped, spent a year looking for a job. Warner Bros, put her under contract in 1936. Last year the Warners, envious with the rest of Hollywood of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's glamorous Hedy Lamarr, started circulating glamorous photographs of Ann Sheridan, her red hair dyed a shade lighter than life, her teeth in permanent caps, her nubile curves seductively displayed. Although her most ambitious job of work since then has been an unimpressive performance in an unimpressive picture called Indianapolis Speedway, Warners' smart young West Coast publicity chief, Bob Taplinger, has made her one of movieland's brightest extracurricular celebrities.

Los Angeles' swank Town House staged, at Warners' instigation, a dinner for 26 males who decided she had more "oomph"' than any girl in town. "Oomph," said Dudley Field Malone, "is a very beautiful thing that convention demands be clothed." Said Screenwriter Graham Baker: "Oomph is something in a girl which begets propositions not proposals, gets her chased instead of chaste." As the Oomph Girl, Cinemactress Sheridan was more photographed, talked about, gossip-columned than any recognized Hollywood star.

For Winter Carnival, Oomph Girl Sheridan was entrusted by Warners' to Independent Producer Walter Wanger, the high-powered Svengali who helped make Clara Bow the It Girl, gave Hedy Lamarr her send-off in Algiers. Mr. Wanger's solution was to cast Ann Sheridan as a tabloid glamor girl returning to the scene of her first triumph, a Dartmouth winter carnival, posing against a picturesque skating and skiing background, falling in love again with the young professor (Richard Carlson) she knew when she was the carnival queen. Although Producer Wanger's expert hand keeps things moving, he cannot keep the Oomph Girl from looking embarrassed throughout, fails to teach her any trick of self-expression more meaningful than a habit of wrinkling her forehead when speaking. The Oomph Girl's next picture will be 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, with John Garfield.

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