The New Pictures

Syncopation (RKO-Radio) is Hollywood's stoutest attempt to date to tell the story of U.S. popular music and how it grew. Unfortunately, the story, as gangling, forthright Director William Dieterle sees it, is too big for its breeches. Instead of illuminating, it interferes with the Grade-A presentation of a score of melodies, lovingly culled from the past 35 years of U.S. dance music.

They are Copenhagen and Jazz Me Blues, Milenberg Joys and Sugar Foot Stomp; a pleasant new tune (Falling Star) which shines brightly in the mellow orbit of Songstress Connie Boswell; spirituals from the Hall Johnson Negro Choir; a jitterbug jam session by instrumentalists Benny Goodman, Harry James, Gene Krupa and others--etc.

Overwhelmed by an embarrassment of riches, Director Dieterle had to make many an embarrassing choice. He chose to emphasize the blues songs "about broken lives and broken dreams"--the Negroes' "trouble music." That meant New Orleans' famed Basin Street and its U.S. equivalent of jungle music. The picture begins in Basin Street in 1907 with the removal to Chicago of Adolphe Menjou, his piano-playing daughter (Bonita Granville) and her blues-singing mammy (Jessie Grayson).

Although Bonita manages to introduce her New Orleans mood music to Chicago, to marry a young man with a horn (Jackie Cooper) and follow him through to the triumph of the modern dance band, story and music never get together. There is too much history to be got over. Furthermore, Miss Granville neither looks nor acts like a hot pianist.

But Mammy Grayson croons a pair of standout melodies (Goin' To Chicago and Only Worry For a Pillow), and the picture's other Negro artists are first-rate-- especially a young Negro boy with a trumpet, knee-deep in Bach at a New Orleans music academy. He loathes the formalized Bach exercises, wants to play his kind of music. After a few bars he does, riding away, loud and low, right out of the academy.

Juke Girl (Warner) is the kind of picture the Brothers Warner love to make: it is crowded with automobiles and trucks. For years the Warners have surpassed all Hollywood studios in their obsession with the output of Detroit's motormakers. They have shot them coming & going, leaving & arriving, doing this & that, until the automobile has become a kind of Warner trade-mark--a shiny substitute for the legitimate stage's entrance and exit doors. This fine feeling for mechanics is hard on Juke Girl, which is supposed to be about juke girls.* It turns the picture into a cross-country road race, with itinerant laborers hurrying their cars to the Florida fruit and vegetable country, packers hurrying their picked produce to market, etc., etc. The result is a kind of minor East Coast Grapes of Wrath.

Lost in the dust of this hurrying traffic are Juke Girl Ann Sheridan and her profession. Instead of working at it, she has to spend most of her time avoiding Richard Whorf, who runs with the labor-bait-ing packinghouse gang, and patching up Ronald Reagan, who likes the pickers. In a rather dull game of social significance and truck theft, the pickers beat the packers.

The picture fails to clear up one of the oldest and most exasperating Hollywood enigmas: why car and truck drivers do not remove the ignition keys from their machines so they can't be stolen as easily as they are in Warner Bros, pictures.

The Great Man's Lady (Paramount) was designed to give belated credit to the women who never get it: those who helped make their men great. Unfortunately, the great man (Joel McCrea) chosen for this bow to womankind wasn't worth the effort. His name is Hoyt, a romantic frontiersman of 1848 who dreams of building a great Midwestern city. His idealism persuades a Philadelphia Main Line girl (Barbara Stanwyck) to go West with him. Some 60 years later he is a dying U.S. Senator, silver rich. He had apparently got his city built (on land he owned). She is the wife he abandoned after she nursed him to greatness.

This lengthy, maudlin attempt to tell a tale of frontier womanhood is tough on Pioneer Stanwyck. Most of the time she is a reminiscing crone of 109, whose makeup is much better than her performance. Elsewhere she is a prairie wife, a Sacramento boardinghouse keeper, a croupier in San Francisco's Crystal Palace, etc. Her most remarkable achievement is to win back her husband's money, livestock and other chattels from a gambler (Brain Donlevy), who is so stunned that he trails her like a whipped dog for eight years. Broadway (Universal) is tired. It has had a long day, and deserves a rest. When it first appeared on Broadway 16 years ago, it was an exciting, hard-hitting, accurate drama of Manhattan speakeasy days. Producer Jed Harris, co-author Philip Dunning, co-author-director George Abbott rode it to a standstill: at one time eight road companies were playing to standing room only. Now it is a worn period piece. The story, about a small-time hoofer (George Raft) and his partner (Janet Blair) and their hope of getting out of nightclubs into the big time, has been turned into a personal vehicle for Cinemactor Raft. He plays himself (a Holly-wood star) under his own name.

Holidaying on Broadway from his Pacific Coast success, he and his picture dissolve back to the time when he was a Broadway hoofer, and Broadway begins. But its star, who is constitutionally unable to play the simple, naive vaudevillian the original role called for, substitutes the life-&-times of George Raft. They are unco dull.

* Dancers at juke joints who dance with anyone who has enough nickels to feed the record-playing juke box and buy them drinks.

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