The New Pictures

Strangers in Love (Paramount) was not strenuously publicized before release. Its derivation, a forgotten fiction by William J. Locke, was no literary masterpiece. Its plot revolves about the old-fashioned problem of dual identity and its cast (Fredric March, Kay Francis, Stuart Erwin, George Barbier) is only up to the Hollywood average. It would be too much to say that the finished product is brilliant or surprising, but it is consistently enjoyable. Everyone concerned with the story seems very much at home in its surroundings; the cinema has been doing this sort of thing for a long time and it has learned to do it well.

When Fredric March takes three drops of medicine in a glass of water, admirers who saw him in his last picture will be momentarily afraid lest he turn into Mr. Hyde. Luckily nothing of the sort occurs. He is a rich villain named Arthur Drake and he is taking strong medicine for a weak heart. The heart is weaker than the medicine is strong, so presently Arthur Drake topples over dead. His disinherited twin brother (also Fredric March in double exposure), who happens to be present, sees the possibilities of this situation. He quickly exchanges clothes with the corpse.

In the scenes that follow the live twin tries to continue his impersonation of the dead one. He has a hard time and the humor of his actions is doubled by the fact that the audience is as baffled as he. When the dead twin's secretary (Kay Francis) comes into the room, she expects the live one to start dictating "where we left off yesterday." He finds himself harassed by blackmailers without knowing who they are and has no one to help him but a blubbering ne'er-do-well (Stuart Erwin), whose mere presence is almost sufficient to reveal the twin's true identity. It becomes the duty of this ne'er-do-well to recover a check from the blackmailers and Erwin does it with such a comical combination of timidity and guile that it is the funniest sequence in the picture. Meanwhile, detectives who have been studying the misdeeds of the dead twin come to apprehend the live one. A motor boat chase (with sirens, which are probably the most important single contribution of sound to the cinema) serves to drench the protagonists and clear up their misconceptions.

Stuart Erwin's strongest recommendation and simultaneously his greatest obstacle to becoming a star is a quality difficult to define except by its effect upon an audience. There is something profoundly inconsequential about his appearance, something gravely and bitterly unimportant about his bearing which stamps his personality with an almost classic insignificance. When you have seen him once you can always forget him; it is this which has made him a memorable comedian.

Born at a place called Squad Valley, Calif., Erwin played five parts--a German, a Negro, an Irishman, a plain young man and a bearded nahob--in his first engagement for the stage. Since then he has advanced far enough to have appeared in 14 Paramount pictures, mostly in bit parts, and to have married June Collyer. His next picture will be Sensation; after that he will play the lead in Merton oj the Talkies. Alias the Doctor (First National). The logical conclusions to be drawn from the success of Arrowsmith are as follows: 1) cinemaddicts enjoy exciting pictures; 2) having seen an exciting picture about a doctor, they would like to see one about almost anything except another doctor. Hollywood producers, however, reason differently. Accordingly, two pictures about doctors opened (see below) last week. This one is removed from the grade of utter claptrap by an authentic though over-diligent sequence of an operation and by the dignified though uninspired acting of Richard Barthelmess as the young surgeon who does the operating. Owing to an overwhelmingly incredible series of mishaps and coincidences, Barthelmess finds himself impersonating his deceased foster-brother (Norman Foster) and practicing illegal surgery on the strength of his foster-brother's degree. Barthelmess's foster-mother exposes him, but the shock of having done so is so severe that she has to have her head sliced open and repaired. Barthelmess. revealed as an impostor, saves her life on the operating table. The last scene shows Barthelmess, cashiered by his confreres, contentedly ploughing a field.

The Impatient Maiden (Universal), from a cheap fiction called The Impatient Virgin, is much closer to earth than Alias the Doctor. Its dialog is less heavily pretentious and its incidents are more sanely correlated. This time, Lew Ayres is the surgeon. Mae Clarke is the victim of his scalpel. Because the routines with which he prepares himself for the operating room are comically similar to those practiced by Barthelmess, it appears that Universal and First National have garnered their clinical research from the same source. Otherwise the pictures are dissimilar. Ayres performs an appendectomy on Mae Clarke. It is a romantic incision the culmination of a love affair in which she has shown herself prematurely disillusioned about marriage. She has advised Ayres not to risk his career by matrimony and has complacently accepted favors conferred upon her by an elderly lawyer. Ayres is indignant until, by a coincidence only slightly less far fetched than those in Alias the Doctor, he arrives at her sick-bed in the nick of time. Good shot: fluoroscope view of Mae Clarke, showing a large safety pin either in her undergarments or her kidney.

Sky Devils (Howard Hughes). Having introduced large scale aerial spectacles in Hell's Angels, Producer Hughes had it in mind to satirize Hollywood with Quiet People and to cap the gangster cycle with Scarface. The first of these ventures fell through. Scarface, after a skirmish with the Hays organization, will be released shortly in non-censoring States. Now while waiting for a new and sufficient radical scheme to pop into his head, Howard Hughes continues to inspect aviation though less expensively than at first. Flying Devils deals with two Army flyers (Spencer Tracy and George Cooper) who have little in common except a bewildering incompetence and their fear of Sergeant Hogan (William Boyd). More of the air shots are reputedly left-over from Hell's Angels, but the action is more in the manner of What Price Glory. Delighted with the comic aspects of the War, Producer Hughes has arranged a series of gay excursions and false alarms. It has his flyers damaging the enemy while they are trying to escape from the guard house. Then he has them dropping a bomb on their comrades as they later fly back to their own lines. Good shot: George Cooper, even less able than Tracy, trying not to loop the loop.

After Tomorrow (Fox). Director Frank Borzage, who made Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, has a remarkably adroit touch with the quiet little romantic comedies he is fond of directing. This one, which was presented as a play last autumn, gains considerably by translation into cinema. It is about a young couple (Charles Farrell and Mari Nixon) who want to get married but find themselves hopelessly hampered by their parents. The boy's mother (Josephine Hull) pesters him into delaying the wedding. The girl's mother (Minna Gombe) runs off with one of her boarders and the girl's father is so upset that he has stroke. All this is done in a mood of frank and unpretentious sentimentality which is utterly different from the kind of hokum with which directors, fundamentally ashamed of their material, commonly surround such stories. The faults of After Tomorrow are its triviality and certain boyish stupidity in the performance of Charles Farrell. On the whole, however, it is a good example of its genre. Typical shot: Farrell placing his fist wistfully against the Nixon chin and advising her to "buck up."

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