New Pictures

Tarzan, the Ape Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) begins in matter-of-fact fashion when a young English girl named Jane Parker (Maureen O'Sullivan) arrives at the cozy hut of her father, an African trader. She is a pleasant character and one not easily startled. Her most definite characteristic is a warm enthusiasm for maternity which makes her approve of 1) an African baby in a bag, 2) a hippopotababy waddling after its mother, 3) a small shaggy ape which seems to be an orphan. When she goes with her father's expedition to find the valley where the long-tusked elephants die, she accepts all hardships calmly and only squeals once, when she topples over a precipice and is barely saved by a ragged rope. The final test of her imperturbability comes when she is kidnapped by a yodeling athlete in a loin cloth who swings her up to his nest at the top of a tree and turns out to be Tarzan of the Apes.*

Jane Parker still seems to be more pleased than frightened. Her abductor does not disillusion her. Although he can only converse with monkeys and is, aside from his ability as a gymnast, convincingly subhuman, Tarzan shows a surprising grasp of the niceties of romantic love. He is only rough once, when he seizes Jane Parker's handkerchief, tears it in half and gives a disagreeable grunt.

When Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) has Jane Parker in his den, the picture really gets into its stride. The ground below the trees becomes alive with tigers, lions, zebras, waterbucks, crocodiles and savage dwarfs. Tarzan is a match for all of them. When a member of the Parker expedition shoots him in the head, he is too tough to mind it and shows his stamina by immediately strangling not one lion but two. When the savage dwarfs capture the members of the Parker expedition and are gleefully preparing to feed them to a large gorilla, Tarzan effects a rescue. He gives his yodel in a loud voice and advances on the dwarf village followed by a herd of friendly elephants. The elephants trample the village to bits and Tarzan disposes of the gorilla. Cinemaddicts will be aided in their understanding of this turn of events by recalling the recent cycle of gangster pictures. The elephants and apes are Tarzan's gang; at the end of the picture Jane Parker has become the moll of the organization.

Tarzan, the Ape Man is frankly and gorgeously spurious. It was not made in Africa with benefit of publicity and palaver, but on the home grounds of Hollywood, where the apes, crocodiles, lions, tigers, dwarfs, elephants and gorillas are better acquainted with their histrionic duties and can discharge them more effectively. Almost as effective as the animals is Tarzan Weissmuller. His ability as a swimmer has never led him into jungles. The wildest animal he ever knew hitherto was the comparatively tame and toothless alligator which used sometimes to be allowed to splash comically in the Roney-Plaza Hotel's luxurious swimming pool in Miami, where Weissmuller was swimming instructor. Nevertheless he acquits himself creditably. His spare frame is not too skinny for the role; he swims faster than Miss O'Sullivan can run and his thick-featured face is what one would expect in a foster brother of wild beasts. He wrestles bravely with animals, stuffed or otherwise, and rides a hippopotamus as though it were a Shetland pony. Best of all is his first appearance--swooping through the trees in huge quick parabolas on a succession of trapezes made of ropy vines and branches.

One Hour With You (Paramount). A memorable moment in this picture arrives when Roland Young is telling Maurice Chevalier that he has evidence that Chevalier has been misbehaving with his wife. He explains that he has had Chevalier watched by detectives. He says: "At 2:35 you got into a taxi in which my wife was waiting. At 2:43 the taxi stopped outside my house." Then, slightly apologetic for describing a sequence of events with which Chevalier must already be familiar, he stops himself and asks: "Am I boring you?"

It is the accent which Director Ernst Lubitsch* gives to scenes like this and the polish with which Young, Chevalier and Charles Ruggles act them, that make them much funnier than they have often been before. The plot of One Hour With You is not startlingly new. Director Lubitsch himself used it before in a silent cinema called The Marriage Circle, but this time he has given it a new informality, with tricks which other Hollywood directors are bound to imitate. Chevalier addresses the audience from time to time and tells them, to make sure that they understand the story, that he is in love with his wife, Colette (Jeannette MacDonald), but tantalized by her best friend. Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin). Most of the dialog, instead of being poorly translated German as is usually the case in Lubitsch opera, is in easy, loosely rhymed couplets. Sample:

Colette: Oh, how's that composer you went with so much?

Mitzi: He's gone, but he had such a wonderful touch.

From an entertainment at once informal and highly artificial, Chevalier's songs spring spontaneously. Even Jeannette MacDonald's trademark scene, the one in which she shows her underclothes, is bearable. Some Lubitsch touches: a small light going on & off at the head of a bed which contains Chevalier and MacDonald ; Chevalier trying to convince a policeman that the lady with whom he has been entwined on a park bench is his wife.

Girl Crazy (RKO) is a vehicle fit for the comic talents of Robert Woolsey and Ben Wheeler, two funnymen from vaudeville who have lately aroused so much enthusiasm among cinemaddicts that they were last week the principals in an experiment to find a new way of paying actors. Harry Cohn, new president of Columbia Pictures Corp., announced that he had hired Wheeler & Woolsey to make a picture for a royalty on its profits, an arrangement never before tried by a major producing company. If it works. Columbia will try it on other employes.

Unless Columbia's Cohn is able to think up a better picture than Girl Crazy, his experiment is unlikely to prove anything. The picture is an adaptation of a Manhattan musicomedy delineating happenings at a dude ranch started by a young Easterner who has been sent west to lead a quiet life. Wheeler & Woolsey arrive at the dude ranch in a taxi. Wheeler i? induced to run for sheriff, an office as dangerous to its incumbent as the presidency of a South American republic. Wheeler giggles constantly; Woolsey chews cigars. A small girl (Mitzi Green) gives impersonations of Bing Crosby, Roscoe Ates, Edna May Oliver and George Arliss. A girl named Kitty Kelly sings three Gershwin songs from the stage version of Girl Crazy ("I've Got Rhythm." "Bidin' My Time," "Not for Me"). Eventually the happy adjustment of a minor romance between the dude rancher (Eddie Quillan) and a coy Arizonan (Arline Judge) serves as an excuse to end the picture. Typical shot: Wheeler & Woolsey tweaking the nose of a wild west villain (Stanley Fields).

The Crowd Roars (Warner). Having recorded the buzzing of airplanes, the rattle of gangster pistols, the slow thunder of artillery, the drumming of horses' hoofs, the squealing of police sirens and other disturbing decibels, it was time for the cinema to investigate the uproars of the common motor car. In this picture, the automobiles are small, slim, built for racing. Less sleek and decorative than the vehicles in which the late Wallace Reid transported himself as the hero of similar sagas about motor racing, they are more exciting and dangerous. There are three races in the course of the picture, two serious accidents, innumerable skids, two gasoline tank fires. All this, photographed brilliantly and from every angle, is enough to make The Crowd Roars a dreadful and a stimulating spectacle. It is almost enough to make you forget that the story, written by Howard Hawks (in collaboration with Seton I. Miller), is slight and spurious as is usually the case when ^ a director undertakes to film his own writings. James Cagney is a race track driver with a curious obsession. He loves liquor and what he calls "women," but he is so anxious to segregate his young brother from all such enticements that he hurls a blonde (Joan Blondell) through a doorway, deserts his own mistress (Ann Dvorak) and whacks his brother (Eric Linden) on the face. Subsequently comes the scene in which, to win the Indianapolis Sweepstakes Race, Cagney has to take his brother's place behind the wheel. Good shot: Billy Arnold, real winner of the Indianapolis Race in 1930, talking to Cagney in the pits before the race.

*Hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs' famed series --Tarzan of the Apes, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, etc., etc. (1914-1931).

*After prolonged bickering, Herr Lubitsch last week signed a new contract with Paramount. He will make three pictures next year, one with Chevalier.

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