The New Pictures

A Notorious Affair (First National). Billie Dove's figure and the clipped accent and expressive eyebrows of Basil Rathbone are the only acceptable components of this cinema. It is an awkward, slow account of the love-affair of an English society woman and a poor musician. People who saw Adolph Menjou in Fashions for Love will understand whence comes the idea for A Notorious Affair, but not how the wit and sophistication that distinguished the Menjou show were eliminated from this imitation. Silliest shot: women swarming about the musician's carriage when he drives up to Albert Hall to give a concert.

Stampede (Pro Patria). The English explorers who made this picture in the Sudan jungle were trying, like some of their predecessors, to make a drama instead of a travelog. They have done a good job. Stampede is a love story. It contains a little manufactured anecdote about the struggle of two young men of the Habbania tribe for a black girl, but its real material is a different kind of love --the instinct, probably more impressive than any other human trait, that keeps the tribe marching toward life, fighting the jungle in the days when the river dries up, when the game gives out. The photography is repetitious of other African researches, but lively, imaginative. Best shot: a tribesman running through a burning forest, carrying the dead body of his chief.

Double Crossroads (Universal). That it is plotty and thoroughly unreal does not keep this little crook-story from being a fair program picture. It tells how a racketeer, just out of prison, decides to go straight on falling in love with a country girl and changes his mind when he finds out she is crooked too. The complications, which reach their climax in a party given at the house of the rich woman whom the gang is out to rob, are made tolerable by their occasional humor and the acting of able bit-characters. Best shot: a sweet old lady, introduced in early sequences as Lila Lee's grandmother, revealed as an astute, avaricious criminal.

The Light of Western Stars (Paramount). One of the major failures of talking pictures is their inability to transform into anything more lurid than drawled "yes ma'ams" and "darn its" the blasting oaths which, in silent westerns, poured inaudibly from the lips of frontier villains. This Zane Grey story, however, is nicely photographed and contains all the proper western elements--mortgaged ranch, murdered cattleman, girl from the east, rescuer on horseback, crooked sheriff. It is all played humorlessly but fairly effectively by Richard Arlen, Mary Brian and a villain named Fred Kohler. Best shots: Harry Green as a Jewish cattle-rustler; a scene in which a herd of wild horses rushes through a fence and over a sloping plain.

King of Jazz (Universal). Although this revue is in many respects a piece of straight advertising copy written around Paul Whiteman, the personality it actually exploits and expresses is that of its director, John Murray Anderson. Whatever unusual, difficult, beautiful physical effects can be managed with the sound and color cinema in its present phase of development, Mr. Anderson has brought off successfully, brilliantly. Miniatures have been juxtaposed with full-sized sets in technicolor, as when Whiteman carries his whole band onto the stage in a satchel. Later the normal-size orchestra plays on top of a monster piano. There are sets that spring, completed, out of the floor, in time to notes of music. There are deep romantic backgrounds of Maxfield Parrish blue, ballets in the warmest, though slightly blurred, pastel tints yet achieved in technicolor. There are angled and overhead shots and hundreds of smart camera tricks. The whole is a musical show taking its continuity from a huge ledger called Paul Whiteman's Scrap Book. Charles Irwin, master of ceremonies, turns the pages; each page is an act in the revue and most of the acts are boring. Director Anderson has made the picture a vehicle for glorifying stagecraft instead of using stagecraft to sharpen entertainment. Actually the entertainment value of King of Jazz is considerably less than that of an unelaborated concert by the Whiteman orchestra; the level of wit is indicated by such parodies as "All Noisy on the Eastern Front" and the "Bridal Veil" number in which, to an incredibly stupid lyric, "the brides of long ago" parade as they have paraded in vaudeville for 15 years.

Best shot (from one of Cartoonist Peter Arno's drawings in The New Yorker) : a young lady and gentleman, the latter car rying the rear cushion of an automobile, arriving at a gas station, "to report a stolen car."

Paul Whiteman weighs 248 Ib. His father was director of music in the Denver public schools, his mother sang in a Den ver choir. He got his start in Santa Barbara playing the violin and wearing a funny hat. After a tour of Africa with a string quartet, he worked in Tait's restaurant in San Francisco, was fired for not knowing jazz. He started a band of his own, borrowed money enough to take his men east where he got a job in the Ambassador Hotel, Atlantic City. His pianist, Ferdie Grofe, a brilliant technical musician, helped him greatly toward fame by his skilful arrangements of current songs. Whiteman himself can tell little about a composition from reading it; he puts in most of his own touches in re hearsal. Famed in the trade for his busi ness acumen, he hires the best and most expensive players, keeps them in a good humor. He paid his former saxophonist, Ross Gorman, $50,000 a year. His own earnings are about $500,000 a year. He likes striped ties and custard, owns a ranch near Denver, likes to wear an old golf cap turned backward, takes a private doctor with him when traveling, can make faces as funny as Fatty Arbuckle's used to be.

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