The New Pictures

Whether the typical U. S. tycoon is a hero or a viper is a question which history has not yet settled. Two cinemas which addressed themselves to the problem last week helped to solve it by examining both sides of the penny.

Banker Dickson (Walter Huston), central figure of American Madness (Columbia) is a noble money lender. He regards honor as an asset more valuable than stocks or bonds and his idealistic viewpoint only indirectly damages his financial standing. Devoted to the interests of his depositors, he breaks an engagement with his wife (Kay Johnson) to attend to a business deal in Philadelphia. This enables her to visit the apartment of his head cashier (Gavin Gordon), who has been dipping his fingers in the till.

An assistant cashier (Pat O'Brien) finds her there but gallantly says nothing about it, even when suspected of having assisted in a robbery of his department which occurred at the time of his call. Finally he is exonerated but not until after the big scene, a scene which is pertinent, exciting and brilliantly directed by Frank Capra. A bank telephone operator tells another operator about the robbery. A third operator tells someone else. Presently shop-keepers are whispering the details to their customers. One depositor warns another: the amount of the peculations jumps from $100,000 to $500,000, then to $5,000,000. An angry, despairing mob storms the doors of the First National Bank. The assistant cashier performs the alert trick that saves the bank, places the blame for the robbery where it belongs.

David Dwight (Warren William) in Skyscraper Souls (MGM) is more likeable than Banker Dickson but far less admirable. It makes no difference to him what his wife is up to; he has a variety of lady friends and lies to them all. He borrows $30,000,000 from his own bank to build a 102-story skyscraper. When threatened with bankruptcy he goes to take a Turkish bath where he persuades a goodnatured plutocrat (George Barbier) to save his venture. Another associate is soon a suicide, ruined by a stock deal in which Banker Dwight runs Manhattan-Seacoast up to 350 and then causes it to go rapidly down. Banker Dickson suffers from his wife's readiness to make him a cuckold. Banker Dwight has amorous difficulties of a very different sort. He makes love not to his wife but to his secretary (Veree Teasdale), then to his secretary's stenographer (Maureen O'Sullivan). The secretary comes to his rooms and shoots him dead, hurls herself out of the top floor of the Dwight Building.

As in Grand Hotel and other recent films, all the action in Skyscraper Souls takes place under one roof. Director Edgar Selwyn, who thinks writers for the cinemas deserve more credit than directors, had a less vivid mob to handle than the one in American Madness, but he disposed them so ably about the corridors and offices of the Dwight Building that its interior seems more densely populated and lively than that of most real edifices of comparable size. Typical shot: Banker Dwight guzzling champagne with his secretary's stenographer while artfully persuading her to take a trip on his yacht.

Doctor X (First National). In cinema's extensive rogues' gallery, lately increasing at an alarming rate, there is no more horrid villain than the one who functions in this picture. A lunatic physician, his habit is to gobble human flesh by the light of the moon, using his scalpel for a butter-knife. He wears for disguise not charcoal or false-whiskers but "synthetic flesh." It would be bad enough if he were the only bogeyman in Doctor X, but in order to supply suspense it is necessary for the picture to include others almost as vicious. The only pleasant people in the cast are Lee Tracy, a jittering reporter as usual, Fay Wray, a typical horror story ingenue, and Lionel Atwill.

Atwill is Doctor Xavier (no clue). He is head of a medical institute which the police think must be harboring a mur derer. Rather than have his institute closed, Dr. Xavier asks for a chance to apprehend the criminal. He does so in a pseudo-scientific manner, by entertaining his staff members at a re-enactment of a murder and observing from their pulses which one gets most perturbed. Aside from the depravity of the villain and the fact that it is filmed in technicolor. Doctor X is a routine nightmare. It has skeletons in every closet, a trembling maid named Mamie, and is intended for avid patrons of synthetic horror rather than for normal cinemaddicts.

Guilty as Hell (Paramount) is notable chiefly because its title contains a sample of frankly colloquial profanity. It is an adaptation of Daniel Rubin's murder play, Riddle Me This, in which a jealous physician (Henry Stephenson) kills his wife and then helps a muddle headed detective (Victor McLaglen) try to pin the crime on an innocent young man (Richard Arlen) whose pretty sister (Adrienne Ames) is admired by the detective's news monger friend (Edmund Lowe).

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