The New Pictures

Miss Pinkerton (First National) be longs to an excellent and recently neglected form of cinema entertainment. It is a mystery story which keeps a straight face. "Who killed Herbert Wynne?" is the question at the beginning. Mystery loves company and the murderer might have been: a butler with exaggerated hands, an old woman who lies grunting on her deathbed, a peeping-Tom physician, a mumbling housemaid, an arrogant young man, one of two immoral young girls, or a lawyer who wears pince-nez spectacles and casts a tremendously large shadow. On the other hand, young Herbert Wynne might have killed himself. The only persons in the cast not suspected of the crime are a detective sergeant (George Brent) and a hospital nurse (Joan Blondell) who is assigned to take care of the old woman.

Miss Pinkerton is handicapped against its current competitors by containing no monsters, lunatics or apes. Its blood-curdling qualities, those of a puzzle rather than a nightmare, are therefore attributable to a skillful adaptation by Niven Busch of Mary Roberts Rinehart's story. Comic relief in mystery stories is so easy to do that it is seldom done as satisfactorily as when a policeman herein finds fault with a nosey reporter. "I'm the Morning Eagle," says the reporter. "Go feather your nest," the policeman says, and throws him off the porch. Joan Blondell's round eyes give her, the astonished appearance proper to a female detective. George Brent, an actor currently being groomed as a competitor to Clark Gable, blunders about pleasantly as the police sergeant.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Fox). Somewhat baffled by the problem of making the kind of pictures which cinemaddicts prefer, most producers do not attempt to specialize. Alert cinemaddicts realize, however, that there are a few exceptions to this rule. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer runs to lavish casts. Universal last year was addicted to monsters. Encouraged five years ago by the vast success of Seventh Heaven to believe that simple, sentimental romances of the type which Mary Pickford played in 15 years ago are not yet obsolete, Fox has diligently furnished them. Usually Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor are hero & heroine. Their antics delight naive audiences and bewilder supercilious ones. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, although Marian Nixon and Ralph Bellamy are the stars instead of Farrell & Gaynor, is in the tradition of Daddy Long Legs and Delicious. Cinemaddicts who would be unable to enjoy watching Marian Nixon ask a horse a question and then seeing the horse shake its head, should remember to avoid Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Marian Nixon is Rebecca, a semi-waif who has to live with two crusty old aunts because her father is dead and her mother has no money. She is lonely; she tries to run away. She runs to a young Doctor Ladd. He persuades her to stay with the aunts. When she is supposed to be at a prayer meeting, she rides with the doctor on his rounds. They go to a house where a lady is having a baby. Rebecca does not get home until morning. Her aunts are furious. One of them has caught pneumonia going to the prayer meeting. When she is better, Dr. Ladd and Rebecca will be married. Typical shot: Rebecca, after riding through a snowstorm in an open sleigh which finally tips over, arriving at her aunts' house with two flakes of snow on her dress.

Million Dollar Legs (Paramount) is a Marx brothers comedy without the Marx Brothers. Instead it has Jack Oakie, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin, Lyda Roberti and an attractive ingenue named Susan Fleming to play opposite Oakie. William Claude Fields is the President of a place called Klopstokia, a small and ludicrous country in which all the citizens are adept at running, jumping, diving and lifting weights. If all the athletes in Klopstokia lay end to end they would reach 432 miles. Angela (Susan Fleming) tells Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie) that she is sure of this because the athletes did it. Fields is President because he is the strongest man in Klopstokia. This does not prevent him from making jolly sayings. Informed that the members of his cabinet are bogie-men, he says: "We'll take them for a bogie-ride."

The plot which Joseph L. Mankiewicz & Henry Myers wrote for Million Dollar Legs has something to do with the Olympic games. In order to enrich the treasury of Klopstokia, Migg Tweeny, visiting the country in the capacity of brush salesman, decides to take its amazingly able-bodied citizenry to Los Angeles. His plans to win all the events in the Olympics are impeded somewhat by a spy, in league with the cabinet members. She, Mata Machree (Lyda Roberti), makes friends with all the members of the team and causes them to squabble with each other. It looks as if Klopstokia may lose after all until W. C. Fields begins lifting weights. He loses his temper while doing so. This causes him to raise a 1,000 Ib. lump which no one else can budge and hurl it so far that in addition to the first prize for lifting weights, he gets first prize in the shot-put. Most able runner in Klopstokia is a ratty major-domo (Andy Clyde). He practices, on the way to the games, by getting out of the train and running along beside it. Later he wins the mile race by accident when chasing a girl on a motorcycle to give her a letter. Lady & Gent (Paramount). Throughout this picture George Bancroft has a miserable time. He is Slag Bailey, a superannuated pugilist who turns up drunk for the bout on which his manager (James Gleason) has bet their last nickel. Beaten, his ruin is completed when his mistress. Puff (Wynne Gibson), has her night club wrecked by gangsters, when his manager gets shot while opening a fight club's safe. While Puff and Slag are squabbling over their misfortunes they receive a telegram which makes Puff suspect that the manager has hidden some of Slag's earnings.

This much of the picture is in the mood of recent writing which, finding pugilism a subject suitable for one-syllable prose, has diligently deprived it of whatever romantic aspects it may once have possessed. The rest of Lady & Gent is in quite another mood. At the house where they suspect the manager has hidden the money, Puff and Slag find instead a small boy. They adopt him. Slag gets a job in the steel mill. Puff becomes a model hausfrau. They send the boy through school and college. The climax arrives when the youth, already a college football hero, wants to become a professional prizefighter. In a desperate attempt to dissuade him, Slag attacks his ward, wins his point by taking one more licking. Good shot: Slag, inarticulate when called upon to make a speech at the graduation exercises of the boy's school.

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