The New Pictures

Ann Carver's Profession (Columbia) is a solemn little problem picture, based on the notion that woman's place is in the home. The banality of this theme is only less startling than the fact that Robert Riskin, who wrote and adapted the story, was clearly under the delusion that he was proposing an explosively novel theory for behavior. This odd combination of circumstances has a peculiar effect. It gives the picture a disarming sincerity; because Fay Wray in a serious emotional role develops a skillful and moving performance, the trite machinations of the plot acquire an incongruous validity. The story: a young architect (Gene Raymond) and his wife are pressed for funds. She goes into a law office, swiftly becomes a celebrated attorney. Her husband, slighted by her friends, humiliated by her success, takes to drink, dancing girls, the profession of crooning. When his mistress strangles herself by accident, he is accused of murder. In court, Ann Carver hammers home the point of the play: it was all her fault for not giving him a home.

Jennie Gerhardt (Paramount) is the second adaptation of a Theodore Dreiser novel which Producer Ben Schulberg and his favorite actress Sylvia Sidney have made for Paramount. The first, An American Tragedy, understandably vexed Author Dreiser. This one, equally understandably, has his approval. Without the patient wisdom of the novel, slurring some of the tragic ambiguities which Dreiser so painstakingly explored, it contains much of the meat of the book, makes its gently sinful heroine and her brash, uncertain lover characters who are affectingly, if somewhat too forlornly, real.

Jennie Gerhardt (Sylvia Sidney) is a girl whose chief characteristic is a pathetic gratitude for small favors. It is this which causes her first mishap: a brief affair with lonely old Senator Brander who dies before he has time to marry her. To support her illegitimate daughter, Jennie gets a job as lady's maid in a patrician menage where the linen closets are large enough for tete-`a-tetes with the chipper young son of the family. Lester Kane (Donald Cook). The romance between Lester and Jennie develops gaily enough until he goes to Chicago to manage a branch office in his father's business. Jennie goes with him, waits a long time before getting up courage to tell him about her daughter. This has no final effect on their relationship but the pressure of his family against it does. Lester resigns from his father's firm rather than obey his father's orders to dismiss his mistress. He takes Jennie abroad. When Jennie finds out what he has done, she leaves him, goes back to Chicago, builds up a life around her daughter and scraps of news about her lover. He sees her twice more: once when Jennie's daughter dies, once when he is dying, to tell her that he never should have let her leave.

There are only a few moments, like the one in which Jennie tells about Love while fitting her daughter's high school graduation dress, when all this becomes as mawkish as you might expect. Forced to abbreviate, to underline, to shade his story, Director Marion Gering managed to preserve in the picture the calm sympathy for persons innocently trapped in a dilemma which was the chief characteristic of Dreiser's book. Donald Cook, Sylvia Sidney and a character actress named Greta Meyer, in the role of an old cousin who takes care of Jennie's daughter, are perfectly cast. Good sequence: A policeman arresting Lester when, for a joke, he is pretending to be trying to scrape acquaintance with Jennie.

Trick for Trick (Fox). The most satisfactory way to see this picture is to arrive in the middle, when Azrah (Ralph Morgan) and the great La Tour (Victor Jory), a pair of major league magicians, are apparently having a contest to see which one can trick the other. You will then be utterly mystified when the great La Tour is found stabbed to death; when a young man in a raccoon coat turns up under a collapsible couch; when two deformed characters, one of them only able to speak with his fingers, crawl through a window and try to drag off La Tour's corpse, which falls into a subterranean chamber full of canvas ghosts; and when a police sergeant solves the not particularly pressing problem of who killed La Tour, by permitting Azrah to hold a spurious seance. All this will build up suspense for the beginning of Trick for Trick in which the presence of these persons and their eccentric behavior is partially explained. If you arrive at the beginning, you are much less likely to be engrossed by a mystery picture which is utterly routine in every detail except the demands it makes upon Ralph Morgan, who seems faintly ill at ease in the turban and smoking jacket of a melodramatic conjurer Typical shot: a young couple (Sally Blanc and Clifford Jones) embracing at the end on the advice of Azrah who just made himself vanish in the air.

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