The New Pictures

Torrid Zone (Warner). As the tough top boss of a U. S. fruit company somewhere in Latin America, Pat O'Brien is plagued by all the annoyances incidental to the culture and timely transport of bananas. He also wrestles grimly with the problems of keeping his tougher assistant (James Cagney) down on the fruit farm, and the disturbing presence in the tropics of Oomph Girl Ann Sheridan (singer and cardsharp). Utilizing Mr. Cagney's irresistible attraction for women, Overseer

O'Brien solves both problems at a stroke by mating the Oomph Boy and the Oomph Girl.

This takes some time and Helen Vinson, whose oomph is less curvilinear and more serpentine than Ann Sheridan's, nearly spoils the happy synthesis. She also is so irresistibly attracted to Cinemactor Cagney that when her overseer husband (Jerome Cowan) remarks that Cagney looks half dead after being shot up in the jungle, Miss Vinson snaps unkindly: "That still leaves him 50% up on you." But Miss Vinson is too much the intellectual type. Ann Sheridan soon demonstrates that the way to Mr. Cagney's heart is to heave a plate of sandwiches at him so that he can duck, catch one and observe that it needs more mustard.

Torrid Zone abounds in such robust action, in rowdy wisecracks by the men, catty wisecracks by the girls, skirmishes with a broad-minded bandit (George Tobias), falsetto funny business by Andy Devine, much sweltering and sweating by Messrs. Cagney and O'Brien. Oomph Girl Sheridan is never affected by the heat. She hops on & off moving banana trains, gets thrown in & out of jail, never even needs to change her one immaculate dress.

The picture's last gag was costly for

Cagney: As the capstone to Warners' build-up of Ann Sheridan, the fade-out required Cagney to observe: "You and your 14-carat oomph!" When Cinemactor Cagney protested the line, Producer Mark Hellinger bet him $100 that audiences would give the gag the loudest laugh of the film. A few days after the preview, Producer Hellinger found Cagney's check for $100 in the mail.

I Was An Adventuress (20th Century-Fox) is a remake of a French film of the same name and a lively demonstration of what Hollywood experts can sometimes do to make a trite story into a thoroughly entertaining picture. The experts are Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, Associate Producer Nunnally Johnson, Director Gregory Ratoff. The story is about two Continental con men (Erich von Stroheim & Peter Lorre) who work the better resorts and the grander hotels until their lovely confederate, the fake Countess Vronsky (Zorina), falls in love and marries one of their well-to-do victims (Richard Greene). Then they go to work on Zorina. This sinister frolic is almost as sure to please U. S. cinemaddicts as the work of its three principal participants-hitherto sick headaches to the industry-pleased their producers.

After seeing Zorina in On Your Toes, which, put on film, made one of last year's saddest musical comedies, nobody but Producer Zanuck would ever have thought of casting her in a picture where she has to dance less and act more. I Was An Adventuress proves that Zanuck was right. Zorina dances better and can walk through her parts as competently as many another Hollywood star. Though somewhat handicapped by facial evidences of intelligence, she can more than hold her own with oomph girls (see above). Least important of her contributions to I Was An Adventuress is her ballet act-Tschaikowsky's Lac des Cygnes, directed by Zorina's especially imported husband, Russian Ballet Master George Balanchine. To his and Director Ratoff's great chagrin, most of the elaborate ballet sequences had to be left on the cutting-room floor after three California preview audiences greeted the boundings of scrim-skirted ballerinas with howls of spontaneous glee.

Almost as big a Hollywood headache as Zorina has been Peter Lorre. Unique as an interpreter of murderous but pathetic maniacs, whose abnormal sensitivity not only makes them suffer but feeds and informs the sadism with which they make others suffer, Lorre's best characterizations are as creepy as a psychopathic giggle. After his triumph as a child murderer in the German picture, M, Hollywood asked him over. But though it has seen many strange things, Hollywood had never seen anything like Peter Lorre. With an uneasy feeling Hollywood compromised by casting Lorre as Mr. Moto, the Japanese imitation of Charlie Chan. For Peter Lorre the part of the kleptomaniac con man in this picture-pathic, apologetic and vindictive-is an artistic rehabilitation.

The most important figure in I Was An Adventuress, Actor-Director von Stroheim, has been more of a headache to himself than to Hollywood. After producing such overdone turkeys as his Greed and Wedding March, veteran Director von Stroheim, who spoke no French, set out to retrieve his career in French pictures. Two years ago came his brilliant portrayal of a cynical Prussian officer in Grand Illusion. As the well-tailored, bemonocled criminal who lives by his wits and on his nerves in 7 Was. An Adventuress, von Stroheim demonstrates again that few cinemactors understand as he does what the camera can and cannot do. His acting is as complex in its organization, as simple, direct and literal in its functioning as the instrument which is to record it. In pantomime von Stroheim does not waste a gesture. In speaking he does not waste a word or an intonation.

Gossip has it that Director Ratoff was less pleased with von Stroheim's part in this picture than von Stroheim. Rumored reason: Actor-Director von Stroheim could not refrain from showing Actor-Director Ratoff how the von Stroheim scenes should be directed. When the shouting threatened to get too loud, newshawks were barred from the set.

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