The New Pictures

The Stranger's Return (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Author Phil Stong's novels have supplied the cinema with something it has needed for a long time--true-to-life stories about U. S. farmers. Fox made his first published book State Fair into one of the best pictures of last winter. The Stranger's Return, which was completed in Hollywood by the time the book was published (TIME, July 10), is an even more appealing pastoral, distinguished by Author Stong's incisive characterizations and by King Vidor's direction which is so authoritative that Lionel Barrymore acts all through the picture without belching once.

Grandpa Storr is the central figure of The Stranger's Return. A hard-fibred, eloquent curmudgeon of nearly 90, he entertains himself by abusing the pasty-faced riff-raff of his family--a nephew's widow, a stepdaughter, her husband--who are his pensioners at Storrhaven while they wait for him to die. When Louise (Miriam Hopkins), the daughter of Grandpa Storr's oldest son, arrives at Storrhaven, the old man gets a new interest in life--showing her that she belongs, not in New York where she has been married and divorced, but on the ancestral Iowa farm. What happens in The Stranger's Return is bare enough in outline. Grandpa pretends to be suffering from senile dementia, uses the three doctors of the county insane board as witnesses to a new will in which he leaves the farm to his granddaughter. She falls in love with young Guy Crane (Franchot Tone) whose land lies next to Storrhaven but there is nothing to be done about it because neither she nor Guy want to hurt Guy's wife. At the end of the story, Grandpa is dead, Guy is going East to teach, Louise is staying on at Storrhaven.

What makes these happenings arresting are those sharp if superficial perceptions of personality which are the salt of Author Stong's books. Before Grandpa Storr speaks a word you find out exactly what sort of person he is by the way he picks up a dish of cold breakfast cereal, carries it out into the yard, dumps it contemptuously into the henyard. Louise falls in love with Guy at a village dance while Simon the hired man (Stuart Erwin) is getting drunk on corn whiskey. For a genre incident--of the kind which have made Stong contributions unique in the current cinema--the best shot in The Stranger's Return is probably the harvesting dinner, with extra leaves in the Storr table, Grandpa Storr grunting at the head of the board and a great company of farmers slobbering down their food--"not," says -- Grandpa, "like pigs--like threshers."

The Song of Songs (Paramount), impaired somewhat by the glum reverence with which the cinema customarily treats the classics, is a pictorially beautiful adaptation of Hermann Sudermann's famed novel. It shows Marlene Dietrich, sinning as usual, but not without good reason. She is Lily Czepanek, a Berlin model who suffers successively from associations with a drunken, tyrannical aunt, a faithless lover, a brutish husband and a riding master.

When she first arrives in Berlin, Lily is swathed in so many petticoats that Waldow (Brian Aherne), the sculptor who lives across the street from her aunt's bookstore, discovers only by a lucky chance that she has pretty legs. She poses for him, in the nude, and, as traditionally happens in such cases, they fall in love. Lily's troubles start when Waldow decides that it would be too troublesome to marry her; instead, taking the advice of his patron, Baron Von Merzbach (Lionel At-will), he leaves her. The Baron promptly marries Lily, has her taught to sing, speak French, waltz, ride horseback with his groom. Then he invites Waldow to visit him and see the transformation.

Actually, no transformation has occurred. Lily, still in love with Waldow and still despising him for treachery, scuttles into the groom's lodge to prove to Waldow that she can misbehave as thoroughly as he has. When the Baron finds out, she wobbles away from his castle into a Berlin cafe. There Waldow finds her, dressed in slinky clothes and singing a refined translation of a song called "Jonny" (of which Miss Dietrich made a record in German two years ago). He takes her back to his studio, watches her smash her own statue, persuades her that they can start again, from scratch.

Heavily underscored by snatches of Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Brahms, the antique sentimentalities of The Song of Songs are effective mainly because Director Rouben Mamoulian and his camera man (Victor Milner) concentrated on giving the story atmosphere and surface. Marlene Dietrich--whom Hollywood supposed to be incapable of performing without the advice of Director Von Sternberg who last winter quit Paramount after a salary squabble but recently returned-- contrives as usual to seem superior to her material. She does her best acting since The Blue Angel, looks handsome enough to make the pleasantest moments in the picture those in which Director Mamoulian became frankly a portraitist. Good shot: Lily smashing the statue--a scene which had to be photographed six times because Miss Dietrich, for all her man-nishness offscreen, found it difficult to manipulate a sledgehammer.

Double Harness (RKO). "Marriage," says Joan Colby (Ann Harding) in this picture, "is a woman's business. Since it is a business, emotions should not be allowed to interfere with it." Starting with this odd theory, she smugly decides that she would be the ideal spouse for John Fletcher (William Powell), a dissolute young sportsman who prefers polo to the shipping business he inherited from his father. She contrives to marry him by having her father (Henry Stephenson) call at his apartment when she is there, starts a vigorous campaign to improve his morale. The campaign works--but not until Fletcher, indignant at the way he has been tricked into matrimony, has shown more than a flicker of interest in a gay and personable brunette (Lillian Bond), whose affection for him is based on less ethereal motives than his wife's.

Like many plays of its type, Double Harness has the major fault of trying to make an arresting problem out of a painfully apparent fallacy. Nonetheless, pleasant interiors, good clothes and two smooth performances by its principal actors help make it inoffensive comedy drama until the last reel. This, which has almost nothing to do with the rest of the plot, concerns a strange dinner party at the Fletchers. One by one the guests are called away by drunkenness or domestic emergencies. The cook fights with the butler. The guest of honor sits down alone with his hostess. When it seems that nothing more can happen unless Joan Fletcher cuts herself with a butter knife, her husband strolls into the dining room and hands her a carton of gardenias.

Mama Loves Papa (Paramount). A timid little clerk (Charles Ruggles) who loves making puns like "sanctuary much" which his fat wife (Mary Boland) fails to appreciate, appears at his office one morning dressed in a cutaway coat. This is because his wife has been lecturing him on the advantages of fine feathers; his employer takes it for granted that he has a funeral to go to, gives him the day off. The clerk goes for a stroll in the park, gets mistaken for the playground commissioner, then accidentally gets the job. He keeps it until he finds out that his political patron is using him as a blind to sell defective ladders and trapezes. Then he stops making advances to the patron's wife (Lilyan Tashman), resigns his job, gets a black eye, totters home in time to appeal to the sympathies of his spouse.

In the hands of Arthur Kober and Nunnally Johnson, this odd narrative serves for a surprisingly tender and humorous little comedy, aided greatly by the skill of Charles Ruggles. He manages to be funny even in the inevitable scene in which he gets drunk at a banquet, eats a doily with his ice-cream, annoys the other guests with a handful of animal crackers, staggers off to bed in the wrong room.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.