The New Pictures

The Phantom President (Paramount) proposes that the way to save the U. S. is to elect George Michael Cohan president. A strange combination of serious flagwaving, savage political comment, pure comedy, farce and romance, it owes much to George S. Kaufman's Of Thee I Sing.

Four political manipulators who can nominate a President tell a dour statesman that he lost the nomination and his one chance for national sex appeal when Claudette Colbert refused to marry him. But when they see a medicine show in which a silver-tongued mountebank and his assistant (Jimmy Durante) are selling their medical compound, they see the natural resemblance between the showman (Actor Cohan) and the Statesman (Actor Cohan). They hatch a plan to elect the statesman president on the show-window antics of the showman. Miss Colbert and the statesman's butler are deceived by the imposture and the former takes a new interest in the showman's version of Cohan. To solve the inconvenient end of the imposture, the statesman arranges to have the showman shanghaied to the Arctic Circle on election night, is so exported himself. The true-blue showman becomes President, Claudette Colbert his First Lady, and Jimmy Durante saves the U. S. by screaming over the radio, "A depression is a hole, a hole is nothin' and why should I waste my time talking about nothin'?"

Noteworthy is the fact that the famed flagwaving manner of beaming, grey-haired, wry-mouthed George Michael Cohan in The Phantom President conveys the real excitement of his own sincere convictions. When he sings, "It's a grand old flag, Don't let it drag," it sounds like a new and tremendous idea of his own. When he prances, he does it like a supersalesman who knows he is good. No actor, he carries off his part ably simply by continually remembering he is George Michael Cohan.

No less certain of who he is, Comedian Jimmy ("Schnozzle") Durante in his fattest cinema part to date gets a full-bodied chance to be hysterically himself. He sings several songs, goes into his famed epileptic fits with popping eyes, rudder nose (schnozzle) and satchel-mouth. When he gets thrown out of places, he dusts himself off absently, saves face by a victorious 11011 sequitur. Cinema audiences are shocked into laughter, as were once Manhattan nightclub audiences, when frail-looking (155-lb.) little Durante survives awful batterings, establishes the immortality of the comedian. Born in Manhattan's lower East Side, he harmonized in Bowery saloons for handouts, sang in Brooklyn beer halls, church and lodge benefits, finally in vaudeville and the Silver Slipper nightclub with his partners Eddie Jackson and Lou Clayton. Connoisseurs of loony comedy have long cherished his phonograph records, "So I Ups To Him," and "I Can Do Widout Broadway But Can Broadway Do Widout Me?"

Of The Phantom President, Actor Cohan said last week, refusing to see the Manhattan premiere, "I will be glad to see the picture when it comes to some neighborhood theatre, because I would like to know what it is about. You see, we had a lot of arguments about what should go into the thing, and I got a feeling after a while that the parts I wanted they just yessed me and cut out of it anyway. They tell me it is a fine picture."

In Pack Up Your Troubles (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Comedians Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy dilute the fumbling slapstick of their usual two-reelers in their second full-length picture. As two discharged doughboys intrusted with a dead pal's little girl, they try to find the grandparents named Smith. Disastrously they try to call on all the Smiths in the telephone directory. They try to amuse the brat, but she tells Stan Laurel a bedtime story and he sinks blearily to sleep. As in most of their work, the story presents the two misfits with an insoluble problem which they try dimwittedly to solve, creating new problems until blind chance solves the original problem, ends the picture. Most of the gags are stale, the picture is too long, the production undistinguished. Yet fatheaded Hardy and wooden-faced Laurel can always make audiences laugh.

A Bill of Divorcement (RKO). adapted brusquely from Clemence Dane's famed play, flaps the sleeves of the modern bogey of hereditary insanity. Like the play, the cinema is humorless, slightly mad, often dramatic. Billie Burke plays the part of the divorced wife of an Englishman who has been in an asylum since the War. She is about to marry again. Her daughter (Katherine Hepburn) by the insane man is about to marry and migrate to Canada to raise a big family. On Christmas Day the insane man escapes and comes home, a curtain having dropped from his mind. When John Barrymore. rolling his eyes quizzically, walks in as the maniac, audiences decide there is some mistake, expect a comedy with Barrymore playfully wrecking small-eyed Billie Burke's romance, telling anecdotes of the merry, merry madhouse. Instead he puts on pop-eyed fits, refers to the asylum darkly as "that place," protests too much in trying to give an accurate picture of a half-cured madman. The wife, terrified, gives in when he pleads with her to return to him but the daughter soon learns to manage him as she discovers that she has a "taint" herself. She sends away her mother and the lover, breaks with her own fiance, stalks mannishly about as a credible example of the straight-necked, clear-eyed younger generation knifing through life. She helps Barrymore get interested in completing his long-unfinished sonata. (The music he plays is no sonata.) The two "tainted" ones agree to stand together. On a note of hope, of "God helps those who help themselves," the picture ends.

In Chandu (Fox), based on a radio serial,* the cinema's use of super-science for thriller purposes spins dizzily off the planet and puts more things in heaven & earth than were ever dreamed of in anybody's philosophy. Thrilling drama for children, splendid farce for adults is this story of a Yoga monk (Edmund Lowe) sent forth from his monastery because the world needs him. He soon finds a villain (Bela Lugosi) worthy of his mettle, along the upper reaches of the Nile. Lugosi has stolen a scientist's death ray potent to toast civilizations to a crisp. He tortures the scientist and his family to learn the secret of its operation. Chandu monotonously rescues them from his clutches to which they monotonously return. Using his knack of turning rifles into snakes, turning gold pieces into toads, stiffening ropes upright in air, passing through solid walls, getting out of coffins at the bottom of the Nile, and abrogating strict Yoga discipline long enough to fall in love with an Egyptian princess, Chandu should reasonably have solved the situation and ended the picture in three minutes. The origin of his power is given as his eyes ("hypnotism, nothing more") and Edmund Lowe's affable face works hard trying to look mystical. Tear-gas is used to make his eyes impotent and give Villain Lugosi a chance to prolong the picture. Resurrected from the bottom of the Nile. Lowe out-eyes Lugosi and the death-ray explodes, leaving civilization untoasted.

Cabin in the Cotton (First National) is a serious drama of the South's cotton belt, full of violence undramatically organized. As the poor tenant farmers' emancipator, Richard Barthelmess lifts his shining face toward a new day when landlords and tenants will "co-operate." Out of Henry Harrison Kroll's novel, able Southern Playwright Paul Green (In Abraham's Bosom, The House of Connelly) has sneaked into the cinema a good playwright's impartiality. The philosophy of the picture is that the rich are bad and the poor are bad, but the rich are bad because nobody has told them how to be good and the poor are bad because they have to be.

Richard Barthelmess, son of a tenant farmer who dies of the scrabble for existence, educates himself with the rich landlord's help, becomes the landlord's man. The poor steal the rich man's cotton, kill his men, burn down his store. The rich man juggles the accounts to keep the poor in debt to him, takes part in lynching a poor man. Each side looks to Barthelmess to betray the other. He snubs a tenant girl's (Dorothy Jordan's) clean love as he succumbs to the unholy temptations of the landlord's daughter (Bette Davis). When the burning of the store destroys the accounts against the poor, the tenants demand of Barthelmess his duplicate set. Strong with social conscience, Barthelmess calls a meeting of tenants and landlords, draws up an unspecified plan for cooperation, blackmails the bully landlord into signing, while the majority of good planter-landlords sign willingly. Retrieving the tenant girl's clean love, Barthelmess goes to lead the new South into economic wisdom.

Even with Paul Green's sincere writing, Barthelmess' well-intentioned acting, Director Michael Curtiz' occasionally striking photography, Cabin in the Cotton fails to excite with its cinematically new problem, treatment and landscape. The sweet, empty face of honey-haired Bette Davis is notably effective in a villainess part. Excellent shot: the lynching party following bloodhounds along the top of a ridge screened by bare trees.

*Started last March, the Chandu radio pro gram (Beechnut Coffee) is top-ranking in popularity, getting 8,000 letters a week. Chandu. played by Gayne Whitman in the Freeman-Lang studio in Hollywood, is sent over the air by electrical transcription.

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