The New Pictures

Lady for a Day (Columbia) is a Broadway sob story, highly effective because in it sentiment is used mainly as a springboard for comedy. Its heroine is a quaintly incredible old woman who sells apples on a Manhattan corner, guzzles too much gin, and corresponds with her daughter, whom she is sending to a Spanish convent, on the stationery of an expensive hotel. Apple Annie (May Robson) finds herself in a dilemma when her daughter (Jean Parker) writes to say that she has become engaged to a young Spanish grandee and that she is bringing him and his father, Count Romero (Walter Connolly), to Manhattan to meet her family.

Apple Annie's best friend, a gambler named Dave the Dude (Warren William) who considers it good luck to buy her wares, decides to help her out. He has her renovated by beauticians, installed in a handsome apartment, rigged in the costume of a respectable dowager. To make the arrangement even more convincing, he has his underlings pose as members of Manhattan's haute monde which they do successfully until one of them, a garrulous old billiard-shark (Guy Kibbee), proposes a reception for Count Romero. Dave the Dude arranges for the waiters and chorus girls of Missouri Martin's cafe to appear as socialites but the police interfere because, in his anxiety to make the affair a success, Dave the Dude has kidnapped three society reporters. To persuade the police to permit the festivities, Dave the Dude calls on the Commissioner, who takes him to see the Mayor, who is having dinner with the Governor. Instead of Missouri Martin's waiters and chorus girls, it turns out that the Governor, the Mayor and all their friends attend Apple Annie's reception, just in time to prevent Count Romero and the daughter from finding out that she is a fraud. Director Frank Capra's light touch as much as Damon Runyon's story makes the picture the more likable for being entirely implausible. Good shot: two glum expressionless faces on either side of Apple Annie's wildly excited one in the crowd at the pier when she meets her daughter's boat. If, as is highly probable, Lady for a Day is a box office success, May Robson will soon be one of the small company of actresses who have become Hollywood stars not because they are handsome but because, in a.lifetime of practice, they have learned how to act. At 68 she is six years older than Marie Dressier, ten years older than Alison Skipworth, eight years older than the late Louise Closser Hale. Stock companies are the best schools for actors. May Robson played in stock for 40 years as well as starring intermittently in Manhattan, London and elsewhere. Says she: "Close your eyes, put your finger on a map and nine chances out of ten I've played there." For the last ten years or so she has been an expert bit-part actress in the cinema. Peculiarly blind to the most obvious qualities in their story, the producers of Lady for a Day were under the impression that her part in it was a bit also, until the reactions of a preview audience made it clear that she was the most important member of the cast. After celebrating the 50th anniversary of her stage career at a Hollywood party last fortnight, May Robson went to Manhattan for the premiere of Lady for a Day, received a wrist watch from Columbia's grateful Vice President Jack Cohn, hurried back to Hollywood to start work on a new picture. She has a five-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. MGM will make a fat profit on Actress Robson for lending her services to Columbia. In her next picture she will replace Marie Dressier as a teammate for Polly Moran. Like most old time actresses, May Robson is light-hearted as well as competent. She takes tapestry pillow covers to the studio to work on when she is not acting, writes a daily letter to her son, a Manhattan stock broker, goes to the races at Agua Caliente as often as she can. Bureau of Missing Persons (First National). To advertise the premiere of Lady for a Day (see above), Columbia's publicity department last week hired an elderly apple vendor named Mrs. Nellie McCarthy to have her hair marcelled, lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria in a silk dress. To exploit Bureau of Missing Persons, First National promised, in advertisements, to pay $10,000 to Manhattan's missing Judge Joseph F. Crater in case he asked for it in person at the box office. Detectives from the Manhattan Police Department's Bureau of Missing Persons--whose Captain John H. Ayers wrote Missing Men on which the picture is based--were on hand to identify Judge Crater. He failed to appear. Unlike Captain Ayers' book, the picture has a plot--about a brash detective named Butch Saunders (Pat O'Brien) who falls in love with a girl (Bette Davis) who comes in to ask about a missing husband. Presently Butch Saunders learns the Chicago Police Department wants the girl for murder; then that the man she is looking for is not really her husband but the person she has been accused of shooting. All this is as engrossing as the normal detective cinema but what gives Bureau of Missing Persons substance and makes it interesting journalism as well as adequate fiction are convincing shots of how a Missing Persons Bureau works. Captain Webb (Lewis Stone), Butch Saunders' superior, is a skillful and intelligent policeman. The picture shows him giving good advice to a child violinist, a man with an overenthusiastic wife, a fussy old bachelor who has lost his housekeeper, an old lady whose daughter has run away. If disappointed because no Judge Crater came for the $10,000 last week, First National nonetheless had reason to be satisfied with its advertising trick. Captain Ayers, who saw the picture while waiting for claimants to appear, pronounced it authentic and ingenious, complimented Actor Stone, pointed out that his underlings, unlike Captain Webb's, are forbidden to chew gum. Penthouse (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Cinemaddicts who have never been there must have confused ideas about Manhattan. Lady for a Day exhibits the city as a paradise for addle-headed apple vendors. Bureau of Missing Persons show's gentle detectives tenderly dissuading vague citizens from intentional amnesia (see above). In Penthouse the New Yorkers are types with whom cinemaddicts should be more familiar--two important gangsters, a socialite lawyer and miscellaneous strumpets, all briskly engaged in alcoholism, murder and adultery. Lawyer Jackson Durant (Warner Baxter) loses his fiancee because she disapproves of his friendship with a jolly gangster named Tony Gazotti. Not especially disheartened, Lawyer Durant presently has a chance to laugh last. His fiancee's next admirer (Phillips Holmes) is accused of murdering a onetime sweetheart at a penthouse party. The real murderer is another gangster, rival to Gazotti, named Jim Crelliman (C. Henry Gordon). Lawyer Durant brings him to justice, forms what looks like a lasting attachment with the sleek underworld girl (Myrna Loy) who helps him. Adapted from a story by Arthur Somers Roche and ably directed by William S. Van Dyke--whose specialty heretofore has been wild animal pictures-- Penthouse is good, straightforward Metro-Goldwyn-Mayerdrama, with glass doors and modern furniture. Most exciting shot: one of Crelliman's underlings (George E. Stone) squeaking and wriggling when he gets the third degree. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Societe General des Films), with Marie Falconetti as St. Joan, was released as a silent picture in 1929. People who admired it for Carl Dreyer's direction, Actress Falconetti's performance in a role which gained much of its power from faithfulness to historical fact, were last week pleased that the film was being exhibited again with satisfactory sound accompaniment. The questions & answers of the trial are rendered by Radio Announcer David Ross, a musical score by Massard Kurzhene.

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