The New Pictures

Forty~Second Street* (Warner). When talkies started, producers naturally tried to make musical pictures. They failed so conspicuously that it is only in the last year or so that they have had courage to try again. Forty-Second Street is an elaborate experiment which Hollywood hopes will justify a new series of musicomedies in film.

If Forty-Second Street succeeds, it will not be because of its plot, which is the old one about a pretty chorus girl getting her chance to star and making good at the opening performance. The formula works out badly in this case because it is handled with cumbersome efforts to achieve atmosphere and because it delays almost indefinitely the best part of the picture, the show-within-a-show which the producers were ingenious enough to call, not Forty-Second Street, but Pretty Lady. The dance routines by Busby Berkeley are a good deal like the ones he did for The Kid from Spain--dances unlike those in any real musicomedy but well suited to the camera's eye which inspects them from unexpected and effective angles. There are two lively songs: "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" and "Forty-Second Street."

Most attractive ingredient in Forty-Second Street is just what you might not expect--Ruby Keeler (Mrs. Al Jolson), who failed to make a Broadway success in her own right because her voice was too small and who was persuaded to make her cinema debut in this picture because she has pretty legs and can tap dance. Ruby Keeler's utter inability to act is far more appropriate to her role than any feigned incompetence could possibly be. It gives Forty-Second Street a charm which the efforts of the rest of the cast--George Brent, Guy Kibbee, Dick Powell and Warner Baxter (as a nerve-ridden musicomedy director)--fail to provide. Good shot: Ruby Keeler drawling her consent when the juvenile, in a state of pop-eyed enthusiasm, asks her to marry him.

Hard to Handle (Warner). In his recent expositions of modern careers of danger & daring, James Cagney has been a gangster, gambler, taxidriver, auto-racer and sneak-thief, all with perfect Brooklyn-Irish sangfroid. In Hard to Handle he is a flip, beady-eyed, irresponsible publicist, as unlike Ivy Lee, to whom he compares himself, as possible. When he promotes a marathon dance he falls in love with one of the contestants (Mary Brian) and has to run away from her mother (Ruth Donnelly) when his partner steals the prize money. Disaster, as usual, encourages Cagney. He promotes a treasure hunt on an amusement pier, scuttles off with his fee while the hunters pull the pier apart.

The tricks of press-agentry which Authors Wilson Mizner and Robert Lord have thought up for Cagney, even the few which are carefully outlined, can scarcely be considered monuments of ingenuity. The best is his stunt of advertising a vanishing cream, which does not vanish, as a fat remover, on the assumption that purchasers will lose weight trying to rub it in. Unlike Lee Tracy's somewhat similar picture, The Half Naked Truth, Hard to Handle depends less upon journalistic exaggerations about an exciting profession than upon the personality of its principal. Cagney, talking and galloping a little faster than usual, is still wholly successful in the character part which he discovered and which, with eloquent repetition, he has made peculiarly his own. Good shot: Lefty Merrill getting the idea for the 18-day diet, when he has been jailed for using the mails to assure the purchasers of Florida lots that they can get their money back by growing grapefruit.

When Warner Brothers announced the title for this picture--Cagney's first since he "retired" after prolonged contract bickering eight months ago "to study medicine"--it sounded like one of Producer Jack Warner's wry wisecracks. Reemployed four months ago, Cagney is now working apparently contentedly on The Mayor of Hell. Last week Warners announced that his $1,750 a week salary had been cut.

The Secret of Madame Blanche

(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A list of pictures about devoted mothers who, deprived of their children, resort to careers of vice:

Madame X (MGM), Ruth Chatterton (son).

The Sin of Madelon Claudet (MGM), Helen Hayes (son).

Once a Lady (Paramount), Ruth Chatterton (daughter).

The Strange Case of Clara Dean (Paramount), Wynne Gibson (daughter).

The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (Warner), Ann Dvorak (son).

Frisco Jenny (Warner), Ruth Chatterton (son).

Blonde Venus (Paramount), Marlene Dietrich (son).

The Secret of Madame Blanche puts Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer even with Paramount. Irene Dunne gives a very satisfactory performance as Madame Blanche, who suffers even more acutely than most of her predecessors. When her husband (Phillips Holmes) commits suicide because he is incompetent to support her, her father-in-law (Lionel Atwill) not only fails to send her money but takes away her gurgling child. The child grows up to be a soldier, sets out one night to have a good time. Propelled by laws of coincidence peculiar to stories like this one, he goes to the very cabaret where Irene Dunne, now a dignified harridan, is acting as mistress of ceremonies. She is able to take the blame when he murders the father of a girl he is trying to seduce. Most inevitable shot: the son (Douglas Walton) denouncing his grandfather in court, where the truth comes out.

* When President-elect Roosevelt visited California last September, he was entertained by Producer Jack Warner who hopes to make himself the Industry's foremost Democrat, as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer has been its foremost Republican. Last week Producer Warner announced that he had accepted, not only for himself but for his employes, an invitation to attend President-elect Roosevelt's inauguration. The Warner party's train, which will go to Washington via San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Denver, Akron, McKeesport, New Haven, Bridgeport, and 46 other cities, with 15 or more Warner Brothers performers making personal appearances, will be called "The Forty-Second Street Special."

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