The New Pictures

Dinner at Eight (Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer). An aging film actor, planning to recoup his fortunes on the stage; Lord & Lady Ferncliffe, just over from London and on their way to Florida; a thick-skinned tycoon named Dan Packard and his Tenth Avenue wife; Dr. and Mrs. Talbot; an elderly actress, Carlotta Vance, trying to squeeze an income out of her stocks: these, with her husband, her daughter, Paula, and her daughter's pleasant young fiance are the people for whom Mrs. Millicent Jordan has her cook concoct an aspic in the shape of a British lion, with flags in his forepaws. Between the time that she makes her arrangements and the time her guests assemble in the drawing room, the picture has revealed their private lives, rearranged their relations with each other. Carlotta Vance has sold her stock in Oliver Jordan's shaky shipping company. Packard--pretending to be Jordan's ally while he tries to ruin him--has bought it. Kitty Packard, because she thinks her social ambitions might be hampered if her husband swindles their hosts, blackmails him into giving it back, infuriates him by announcing that she has a lover. It never occurs to Packard that the lover might be young Dr. Talbot. Mrs. Talbot finds out when she hears the doctor talking to Kitty on his office telephone, just before the nurse comes in to say that Mr. Jordan is outside. Some of her guests have already arrived by the time that Mrs. Jordan, tormented by news that her cook has dropped the aspic, learns that her husband has an incurably bad heart. Some of her guests never do arrive. The Ferncliffes, "those miserable cockneys," have their secretary telephone to say they have left town. Larry Renault, the actor, harassed by poverty, conceit and a futile love affair with Paula Jordan, has committed suicide in his hotel room.

As a frame for juxtapositional drama of the type that came into fashion with Grand Hotel, a fashionable dinner party is ideal. As a frame for one of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's all-star casts, the play by Edna Ferber and George Kaufman which was produced in Manhattan last winter was even better. The actors in Dinner at Eight selected by MGM's new producer David Selznick, make the cast of MGM's Grand Hotel, produced by Irving Thalberg, look like a road company, make the picture--less biting but more comprehensive than the play--superb entertainment. Under Director George Cukor, John Barrymore (Larry Renault), Lionel Barrymore (Oliver Jordan), Marie Dressier (Carlotta Vance), Jean Harlow (Kitty Packard), Wallace Beery (Dan Packard), Lee Tracy (Renault's agent), Billie Burke (Millicent Jordan), Edmund Lowe (Dr. Talbot) and Karen Morley (Mrs. Talbot), supported by such $1,000-a-week celebrities as Phillips Holmes, Jean Hersholt, Madge Evans, Grant Mitchell and the late Louise Closser Hale, perform brilliantly and avoid each others' toes. Good shot: Kitty Packard making up her mind to give her maid a bracelet. Paddy, the Next Best Thing (Fox) is very clearly Fox's notion of the next best thing to Metro's Peg 0' My Heart. It is an idyll of the Irish countryside, dripping with Hollywood blarney, Janet Gaynor's girlish charm and terms of endearment like "acushla."

In the seaside village where such Gaelic trifles properly begin, Paddy Adair (Janet Gaynor) is the younger daughter of an improvident Major (Walter Connolly), who has succeeded in arranging a betrothal between his eldest daughter Eileen (Margaret Lindsay) and handsome Larry Blake (Warner Baxter), who has a Rolls Royce and a yacht. When she learns that Eileen loves not Larry Blake, but a poor boy of the village named Jack Breen, Paddy does her loveable best to break the engagement. She snubs Blake, then flirts with him, finally tells him in plain terms why her sister is marrying him. All this has a good effect. After her father has been kicked to death by one of his horses, Eileen marries Jack Breen. Larry Blake decides that not Eileen but Paddy is his real acushla. persuades her that she loves him also. To this assiduously elfin but capably assembled production, Walter Connolly contributes a few genuine moments--like the one in which, with shamefaced grins at his daughters, Major Adair borrows -L-3 from Larry to pay for a box of cigars.

In This Day & Age (Paramount), Cecil Blount DeMille addresses himself to two obsolescent problems: 1) the gangster, 2) the younger generation. A director who combines the talents of a burlesque impresario and a soap-box revivalist, he makes the result a noisy and preposterous melange, calculated to arouse squeals of excitement or of ennui, according to the audience's mental age.

In outline, the story concerns the contest between the student body of a small-town high school and a peculiarly childish gangster named Louis Garrett (Charles Bickford). When the gangster shoots a Hebrew tailor for refusing to pay for "protection," the schoolboys indignantly try to find evidence that will convict him. When the gangster shoots a schoolboy whom he finds skulking in his bedroom, the schoolboys form a secret society for revenge. Here Director DeMille, more up to date in method than in ideology, stole a few ideas from Nerofilm's M. Whistling bars from "Yankee Doodle" as a code signal, the members of the secret society creep up on Garrett, gag and bind him with adhesive tape while he is having his shoes shined. A high-school girl (Judith Allen) entertains his bodyguard while the boys take Garrett to a deserted factory, try him in a kangaroo court, exact his confession to both murders by dunking him in a rat-infested well. The conclusion is an amazing scene, presumably a DeMil-lenium, in which the schoolboys parade through the streets singing such songs as "The Old Grey Mare" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while riding Garrett on a rail to the courthouse.

Outmoded in other respects, Director DeMille still has two assets which his confreres may well envy--an unabashed sincerity, an utterly individual style. Even in so poor a picture as This Day and Age, DeMille's crowd scenes, his overemphatic tricks of narration, his kindergarten dialog, produce a queer effect of compelling attention without being in the least convincing. After seeing the picture audiences should be better able to credit the most recent additions to the Hollywood saga about DeMille. Back from a preview of The Sign of the Cross, in which the thing the crowd liked best was Charles Laughton's brilliant high comedy performance as Nero, Director DeMille whispered sadly to a confrere: "I have something terrible to tell poor Charlie. The audience laughed."

Bitter Sweet (British & Dominions) is a lavender-scented reproduction of Noel Coward's operetta about a girl who married a young musician, became a dancer at the Viennese cafe where he led the orchestra, attracted the attentions of a lecherous captain, had her heart broken when the captain stabbed her husband to death. With much more charm than most British musicomedies--which are inclined to be prim and lazy--Bitter Sweet is notable chiefly for its blonde leading lady, Anna Neagle, a onetime chorus girl. The producers of the cinema version of Bittersweet which Noel Coward insisted be made in England, chose her for the leading role in preference to Evelyn Laye or Jeanette MacDonald. Aside from a contract to play the title role in British & Dominion's forthcoming Nell Gwynne and a bad habit of twitching her paws, Anna Neagle has all the requisites for a speedy trip to Hollywood.

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