The New Pictures

Monkey Business (Paramount). This picture begins when a first mate on an ocean liner tells the captain that there are four hidden stowaways on board. "How do you know there are four?" asks the captain. "They are singing 'Sweet Adeline,' " says the mate. Routed from the barrels in which they have secreted themselves, the Marx Brothers undertake to distress the other passengers. Harpo, on a kiddy-car, slides about the deck with evil looks for all. He captures and becomes the friend of a frog, which he keeps in his hat. He carries a cane which has a horn at one end, for no reason. Chased by the mate, he dives behind the curtain of a Punch & Judy show and pokes his shaggy head out in expressions of derision and despair. Groucho Marx makes friends with a gangster, throws a revolver into a pail of water. "It was necessary to drown the gat," he says, "but we saved a little gitten." Later he undertakes to discuss Love: "When love goes out the door money flies innuendo."

Chico impersonates a tough Italian, Zeppo makes friends with a pretty girl. Presently the boat docks and the Marx Brothers are faced with the problem of getting off without passports. This they try and fail to do by singing like Maurice Chevalier. Harpo, most furious at having his queer purposes interrupted, leaps on the desk of a passport inspector. Grinning wildly, he tears up thousands of important papers, stamps the pate of the chief passport inspector with a rubber stamp. The Marxes go to a party. They have contracted simultaneous alliances with two rival gangsters aboard ship. At the party, one gangster kidnaps his rival's daughter. She is the girl whom Zeppo admires and when she has been retrieved from a barn, in which Harpo makes advances to a calf, the picture ends.

Like other Marx Brothers pictures (The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers), Monkey Business makes as little sense as possible. For this and other reasons, admirers of the Marx Brothers will find it marvellously funny. Admirers of Harpo Marx who, when he smiles, looks like a maniacal Charlie Chaplin, will be particularly pleased. He is still the funniest as well as the most versatile Marx. Young Zeppo is more active than usual but he seems a dullard in comparison to his funnier brothers. Zeppo (Herbert) Marx has always been embarrassed by the necessity for playing pallid roles which cause spectators to say that there are only three and one-half Marx brothers. When the Marx Brothers were playing Animal Crackers on the stage, Producer Sam H. Harris said to him: "Can't you get a little more variety into your performance?" Replied Zeppo: "Just how many ways are there of saying yes?" The Gay Diplomat (RKO Radio) is a routine spy story which contains the one necessary new factor in the spy story formula. This factor consists in having two beautiful women both suspected of being spies. One of them, the heroine (Genevieve Tobin), proves to be innocent. The other (Betty Compson) is trapped by a handsome Rumanian officer (Ivan Lebedeff). The fact that Ivan Lebedeff speaks very poor English has been disguised by setting the action in Rumania which, with Bohemia, is usually selected as the mise en scene for cinemas in which the actors are linguistically deficient.

Cinemactor Lebedeff gives a bright-eyed performance as an irresistible ladies' man. It is clear that his employers hope that one day he will be their Valentino. He does his duty as a spy with a maximum of flirtation, gold-buttons, waltzing, suave intimidations and grimaces. His savoir-faire is taxed too severely only once--when the heroine, of whom he is enamored, accuses him of being too attentive to another woman, whom he suspects of being the spy he is trying to capture. Richard Boleslavsky's direction is more expert and more original than was required by so commonplace a story but it helps make The Gay Diplomat an adequate romantic melodrama. Typical shot: Lebedeff making friends with a Genevieve Tobin by peeking into her handbag.

New Adventures of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ). Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, hero of a book and magazine saga written by George Randolph Chester, has become a classic figure of the stage and cinema. This time, Wallingford is William Haines, who lacks the fat paunch, the long cigar attributed to his hero by Author Chester. His adventures, though new in particulars, are familiar in pattern. It is Jimmy ("Schnozzle") Durante, long-nosed cabaret comedian, who provides the laughable variations.

He is Wallingford's most loyal if not his most able assistant. When Wallingford dupes the leading citizens of a small town into buying stock in what he believes to be a worthless undertaking, Durante is delighted. He prowls about, muttering or screeching words whose meaning pleases him. Defeated in an argument, he scowls and says "I'm silenced." And when Wallingford, to retain the respect of a small-town girl, plans to reimburse his stockholders, Durante is disgusted. "Putty in their hands,''' he growls, wagging his absurd snout. Wallingford's wildcat holding company is discovered in the end to be a sound investment. Durante is last seen lighting his cigaret with a worthless check and chortling at a chief of police.

Durante's fame as a comedian is due partly to his long nose; partly to a facility in wisecracking which he acquired while assisting in his father's barber shop; and partly to two other comedians, Eddie Jackson and Lou Clayton. With Clayton & Jackson, Durante attracted the attention of Florenz Ziegfeld by wild antics which entertained the patrons of various Manhattan nightclubs and the Palace Theatre (vaudeville). Ziegfeld gave the team a run in Show Girl two years ago. Early in his career, Durante had been a night-club entertainer in Harlem, a piano-player in Coney Island where he ballyhooed his own act and described himself as "the great Jimmy Durante." As eccentric off the stage as on it, he likes eating piecrust so much that he carries it around in his pocket, has a secretary to see that his clothes are buttoned up when he gives a performance, experiences difficulty pronouncing long words. He claims not to understand most criticisms of his work, values them chiefly for their length. Nicknamed "Schnozzle," he has the same nickname in this picture, will be billed as "Schnozzle" Durante wherever the picture plays.

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