The New Pictures

Lady of the Tropics (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). "In the Orient," as M. Jacques Delaroch (Joseph Schildkraut) has occasion to tell young Bill Carey (Robert Taylor) early in this picture, "we are less concerned with changing things than with enjoying them." A half-caste who-has made himself one of the richest men in French Indo-China, M. Delaroch is content to enjoy the attentions of half-caste Manon de Vargnes (Hedy Lamarr), cares nothing about her ambition to escape to Paris and change herself into a Frenchwoman. When Bill takes a good look at Manon, jumps the yacht on which he has been a guest in order to marry her and help her change her life, M. Delaroch assumes a more active role. He blocks the Carey passports, lures Bill into the jungle, tries to teach Manon the virtues of passivity. But Manon, who has taken a good look at Bill, knows what she wants too.

To anyone who saw Hedy Lamarr in Algiers, it is plain that M.G.M. is on the side of M. Delaroch. In mood and decor, Lady of the Tropics is a faithful echo of the Wanger picture that introduced Cinemactress Lamarr to the U. S., made her the most celebrated siren of the screen since Theda Bara. After spending a small fortune on a picture with Spencer Tracy that had to be junked, M.G.M. handed Hedy and Screenwriter Ben Hecht over to Producer Sam Zimbalist, fresh from Tarzan Finds A Son. Practical Mr. Zimbalist, correctly figuring that audiences would like a picture as much like Algiers as possible, let the camera eye ogle Lamarr's uncanny physical charms, duplicated Producer Wanger's feat of making the Lamarr torpidity seem exotic. Somewhat bowled over himself, Producer Zimbalist observed: "Hedy is just a nice girl, not at all vain, and a hard worker. She has a natural allure. ... If anything, we've attempted to tone down the sex appeal she exudes. . . . All through the picture she is covered from head to toe. ..."

Fifth Avenue Girl (RKO Radio) rings an agreeable change on one of the theatre's sturdiest cliches: that nothing can untangle a snarled up family so effectively as a nervy outsider who plumps into its midst. Director Gregory La Cava, who tried it with a butler in My Man Godfrey (1937), this time does it in distaff with a working girl. When rich Mr. Borden (Walter Connolly) is stood up by his wife and family on his birthday, he wanders gloomily into Central Park, finds himself talking about the seals to pretty young Mary Grey (Ginger Rogers). Discovering by accident that Mary makes his enameled wife (Verree Teasdale) pay attention to him for the first time in years, Mr. Borden rightly concludes that her attention will be completely captured if Mary moves into the Borden house. Since the house also contains a highly impressionable pair of adolescent Bordens, the audience rightly concludes that Mr. Borden will soon get more from his employe than he bargained for.

To spectators who saw neither My Man Godfrey nor any of the variants of it since mimeographed in Hollywood, Fifth Avenue Girl may well seem one of the best pictures of the year. Good shot: Mrs. Borden, an apron over her sequins, wooing her husband by industriously scenting the Borden mansion with a succulent pot of Irish stew.

Our Leading Citizen (Paramount) shows that when capital and labor get to scrapping in a Midwest U. S. city in the year 1939, Hollywood's sympathies are unequivocally on the side of Abe Lincoln.

It is from a bust of the Great Emancipator above his desk that Lawyer Lem Schofield (Bob Burns) derives the inspiration that enables him to oil the troubled industrial waters, keep his young partner out of the clutches of a slick capitalist and the workers of his home town out of the clutches of an equally slick radical, and wind up with his party's nomination (tantamount to election) to the U. S. Senate. In vanquishing un-American influences from rich and poor, Lem has to knock a few heads together, but mainly he relies on talk. If Abe Lincoln had been half the man Lem Schofield was, it is plain that the U. S. would never have fought a Civil War.

Taken from a story by Irvin Cobb which had been designed as a vehicle for Will Rogers, sold by M. G. M. to Paramount after Rogers' death, Our Leading Citizen was reshaped by Producer George Arthur not only as a vehicle for bazooka-playing Bob Burns but as a Hollywood version of Broadway's The American Way. Despite the skepticism of Hollywood leftists, cutters left intact most of its supposedly inflammatory scenes, including a pitched battle between strikers and strikebreakers bloodier than any yet seen in the newsreels, a citizens' meeting where a cynical employer (Gene Lockhart) diverts attention from his own misdeeds by an appeal to patriotism that makes the eagle scream. By last week no capitalist had made public protest. But because the picture (possibly in an attempt to avoid the susceptibilities of warring union factions) shows the workers unorganized and misled by an outside agitator, organized labor's box-office pressure group, Film Audiences for Democracy, was last week threatening a boycott.

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