The New Pictures

One Sunday Afternoon (Paramount). Old-fashioned people who, when they speak of ''the movies" still think of cowboys, sheiks and embraces on an Empire sofa, should see this picture adapted from James Hagan's stage comedy One Sunday Afternoon. It is a calm, observant little comedy which shows how a man who thinks that he married the wrong girl finds out finally that he married the right one. In it, Gary Cooper, Paramount's No. 1 sex specialist, gives a first-rate performance as a country dentist.

The picture opens in Dr. Biff Grimes's dental parlor, where he is tippling with his friend Snappy Downer and thinking how sad he still is because, years before, Virginia Brush got married to rich Hugo Barnstead. Into the office walks Hugo Barnstead, to have a tooth pulled. Biff Grimes grimly turns on the gas, apparently planning to leave it on until Hugo is out of the way. Then comes a long flashback. It shows Biff Grimes, in youth a boastful lout, and Hugo (Neil Hamilton) meeting Virginia (Fay Wray) and her less exciting friend Amy Lind (Frances Fuller) at an amusement park; Hugo getting married to Virginia one evening when Biff thinks he has a date with her; Amy getting married to Biff, to console him. The door of Biff Grimes's office opens again and in walks Virginia, looking and acting like a cut-rate Mae West. Dr. Grimes turns off the gas just in time to get Hugo and his wife safely out of the office, calls Mrs. Grimes and takes her proudly for a walk. "Good shot: Snappy Downer wincing as he watches Dr. Grimes pull Hugo Barnstead's tooth.

One Man's Journey (RKO). Dr. Eli Watt (Lionel Barrymore) has a hard time in life. His wife dies in bearing him a son. He goes back to the small town where he was raised, vaguely ambitious to get away to the city and make a name for himself, but little things prevent it. After 20 years, he is still talking about leaving, still accepting vegetables in payment of his fees. When Letty McGinnis (Dorothy Jordan)--at whose birth he performed a Caesarean operation--gets into trouble with young Bill Radford, Dr. Watt has to stay on and see that she recovers from drinking poison. Bill marries Letty. When Bill begins misbehaving and Letty falls ill, it is Dr. Watt, not his son Jimmy, grown into a prosperous young surgeon, who saves her life again. His reward for a lifetime as a self-abnegating "country plug" arrives when a specialist from the city, after observing his methods of curing Letty Radford, makes a speech at a medical banquet, calls Dr. Watt a great physician. As Dr. Watt, Lionel Barrymore acts so shrewdly that Katharine Haviland Taylor's lachrymose little story has moments of validity.

The Masquerader (Samuel Goldwyn). John Chilcote, M. P.. harassed by drink, drugs, nervous instability and a vampire mistress, one foggy night bumps into an impoverished journalist cousin who looks exactly like him. The next day. too jagged to make an important speech, Chilcote calls on the. cousin, John Loder, persuades him to double for him. Loder turns out to be the man that Chilcote should have been. His speech arouses cheers. He falls in love with Chilcote's lovely estranged wife (Elissa Landi), does his best to dismiss vampirish Lady Joyce (Juliette Compton). Chilcote's faithful servant Brock (Halliwell Hobbes) is party to the deception, helps prolong it until Chilcote is dead and Loder has nothing but a War scar on his wrist to remind him that he has been a masquerader.

Dual impersonation in the cinema is such an old and obvious trick that it usually makes for implausibility unless the actor who attempts it is skillful enough to give the two characters definite and different personalities. Ronald Colman succeeds in doing so, most brilliantly when, as Loder, he is imitating Chilcote's mannerisms just badly enough to make the audience feel that it is an imitation and just well enough to make the audience feel that the imitation might have fooled Chilcote's intimates. Typical situation: Loder. "making mistakes in wives," chatting with Mrs. Chilcote in the hope of learning who she is.

Broadway to Hollywood (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Five years ago, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made an expensive musicomedy called The March of Time, decided it was not worth releasing but a shade too good to shelve.* After endless ineffective tinkering, Willard Mack and Edgar Allan Woolf rewrote the story. MGM selected a new cast. Broadway to Hollywood is the result. The few remaining shots from the old film--a technicolor ballet executing a blurred march down an exaggerated stairway--might better have been left out. Based upon the tedious conviction that there is nothing quite eo glamorous as a vaudeville actor, the rest of the picture is fairly entertaining because Frank Morgan and Alice Brady give such good performances.

They are Ted and Lulu Hackett, happy hoofers whose act improves when small Ted Jr. (Jackie Cooperj is old enough to swing a cane. The Hacketts make the mistake of never changing their routine. Young Ted marries a danseuse (Madge Evans), takes to tippling and "chasing." She dies in an accident. He dies in the War. The old Hacketts add their grandchild to the act, watch him grow up into a Hollywood juvenile. When he misbehaves instead of going to the studio, old Ted Hackett pulls himself out of a lady's bed, packs him off to the lot, dies com- fortably while watching him do an honest buck & wing in the family tradition.

Most authentic shot: Ted Hackett III wearing the white towel-scarf which Hollywood juveniles use off-stage as though it were a uniform.

--No connection with TIME Inc.'s radio "March of TIME."--Ed.

Goodbye Again (First National). Kenneth Bixby (Warren William), an itinerant lecturer sharing a Cleveland hotel room with his pretty secretary (Joan Blondell), is amazed when a pretty Mrs. Wilson (Genevieve Tobin) walks in and greets him as "Ken darling." When he learns that Mrs. Wilson's first name is Julia, that they had a romantic attachment in college, and that her interest in him is as lively as ever, he begins to reciprocate. While they are reviving their intimacy elsewhere, Kenneth Bixby's hotel room becomes thronged with Mrs. Wilson's strange relatives. A sister and the sister's young fiance, gloomily confident that Julia will make a fool of herself, arrive to prevent it if possible. Mr. Wilson (Hugh Herbert), eager to see in person the paragon with whom his wife has reproached his own imperfections, spends the day playing the radio and dancing amiably with Bixby's secretary. When Bixby leaves town, Mrs. Wilson and all her relatives follow him. In Albany, his shrewd secretary helps him get rid of what is fast turning into a menace. Weeping because Bixby has killed what she calls her "other me," Mrs. Wilson trails sadly away calling her amiable husband. Says Harry Wilson: "I guess I'll take all four of me and go home."

The main difference between the cinema Goodbye Again and the play from which it was adapted is that the play was better acted. Warren William is cuter but less dexterous than Osgood Perkins; Sally Bates made the secretary an important person and Joan Blondell does not. On the screen as on the stage, the chief distinction of Goodbye Again is the character of Harry Wilson, possibly the most extraordinary cuckold in U. S. fiction. Beneath his unforgettably humdrum exterior, he is animated by something--either impenetrable stupidity or a sly and sprightly wisdom--which makes him wag his head with private amusement at all that happens to him. When he meets Mr. Bixby on the train, he is unaffectedly delighted, reproves his sister-in-law for being curt. "Let Mr. Bixby talk," he says:. "Mr. Bixby is a fine talker."

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