The New Pictures

The Private Life of Henry VIII (London Film Productions, Ltd.). When he has Anne Boleyn executed, robustious Henry VIII is in high spirits. He has a drum give the signal the instant her head rolls off the block so that he need waste no time about marrying foolish, pretty Jane Seymour.

The day Jane Seymour bears him an heir, Henry is out hawking. He gallops back to the palace across windy fields, barely pauses to say "Poor little Jane!" when he hears that she is dead.

His ministers arrange to marry Henry to Anne of Cleves but she falls in love with the courier he sends to invite her to England. To spite Henry, she makes faces at him when they meet. The king is infuriated when, on their wedding night, she wins most of his pocket money, playing cards in bed.

Catherine Howard, the prettiest lady in the court, is in love with young Thomas Culpepper, but she still thinks it would be pleasant to be queen. Henry, in love with Catherine before his marriage to Anne of Cleves, marries her after the divorce. These are Henry's gayest days. "Life has found its meaning," he tells his court one night on his way to the Queen's room after a day of hunting. When it becomes apparent that the meaning is a love affair between Catherine and young Culpepper, there is only one thing for the king to do.

When the drum tells him that Catherine's head has rolled off the block, Henry is alone. More from force of habit than anything else, he takes one more wife, Catherine Parr, his children's nurse. She wraps him in blankets, looks disgusted when he dribbles in his beard.

The fact that fat, squashy Charles Laughton looks almost exactly like Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII is really a very trivial aid to this picture. Laughton gives all his impersonations a preternatural vitality and if he had happened to look otherwise, it would merely have seemed that Holbein had been inaccurate. The whole picture, directed by Alexander Korda, reflects the validity of his acting: it is a shiny, caustic, understanding portrait of a personage as comprehensible as he is extraordinary. Elsa Lanchester (Mrs. Charles Laughton) does, next to her husband, the cleverest acting in the picture. Binnie Barnes as Catherine Howard, Merle Oberon as Anne Boleyn and Wendy Barrie as Jane Seymour, despite their appalling names, are lovely looking. Good shot: Henry, between wives and deeply bored, spitting out a mouthful of dinner before rebuking his court for lack of refinement.

Night Flight (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's system of casting all its available celebrities in the same production has the advantage of giving unpretentious stories a tantalizing air of grandeur. Night Flight is an adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's prize novel about the first night nights on a South American airmail route. Far from being an aviation "epic," it is really a study of an airmail port in operation at a crisis. The hero of the picture is not Jules Fabian (Clark Gable), whose plane is blown to sea by a cyclone, forced down by lack of fuel, but Riviere (John Barrymore), the general manager of the air lines, who has to order Mme Fabian (Helen Hayes) to leave his office, rebuke his subordinate Robineau for being too familiar with pilots, send the European mail out into a storm, accuse his bravest pilot of cowardice to steel him for his job.

Somewhere between the novel and the picture, the character of Riviere became a little blurred. Barrymore plays it coolly and shrewdly but somehow never quite pulls the picture into perfect focus. Partly because the acting and camera work are splendid and partly because it is a sincere effort to investigate an engrossing subject, Night Flight remains an exciting and intelligent production. Robert Montgomery, Lionel Barrymore, Myrna Loy, William Gargan, have minor roles. Good shot: Jules Fabian's plane breaking through the clouds into moonlight.

I'm No Angel (Paramount). When the fiancee of a young man whom she is trying successfully to seduce calls at her penthouse, Tira (Mae West) is not amused. "I'll trouble you to scram," she says, gesticulating with her hips. When she has pushed her caller through the door, Tira feels the need of light refreshment. "Beulah, peel me a grape," she tells her maid.

Tira's manners in this scene are congruous with her past. A honky-tonk dancer whose behavior at all times suggests that she is on her way to bed, she has improved her station in life by performing in a wild animal act and putting her head in a lion's mouth. As an important circus celebrity she continues to make advances to most of the men she meets. When young Kirk (Kent Taylor) kisses the inside of her hand, she rolls her eyes and growls: "You got me!" After ejecting Kirk's fiancee, Tira receives another caller whom she entertains more hospitably. He is Jack Clayton (Gary Grant), Kirk's cousin, who has come to request that she leave young Kirk alone. After one look at Clayton, Tira is pleased to do so.

One obstacle comes up to prevent a permanent union between Clayton and Tira. The manager of her circus arranges to have one of her old admirers, just released from prison, meet Clayton in pajamas when he calls at Tira's apartment. This leads to an estrangement, a breach of promise suit by Tira. In court she leers at the jury, winks at the judge, so thoroughly embarrasses character witnesses brought in to defame her that Clayton decides not to contest the case. When he calls on Tira to say that he still loves her, he suggests that they go away together for a rest. "Would you call it a rest?" leers Tira.

The Central Association of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, meeting in Milwaukee last week, congratulated Mae West for popularizing plump female figures, called her style "a boon to motherhood." The

Hays organization should be grateful to the C. A. 0. & G. because it would be difficult to find any other grounds for considering Mae West a good influence on the U. S. cinema public. The narratives and conversation in her pictures, which she writes herself, are only less suggestive than her extraordinary gait--a combination of slink, strut and waggle. Uttered in her slurring, husky voice, Mae West's slogan--"Come up and see me some time" --sounds like the composite catchphrase of all improper stories. Because Actress West's manner of dealing with her material is light-hearted rather than lubricious, Vm No Angel, like She Done Him Wrong, is much more amusing than offensive. Good shot: Jack Clayton trying awkwardly to leave when, at their first meeting, Tira indicates that she would like to have him stay.

As her accent suggests, Mae West originated in Brooklyn, not later than 1900. Her father, Jack West, was a prizefighter and theatre bouncer. Her sister played in vaudeville as Beverly Osborne. In vaudeville, Mae West developed her figure with an acrobatic act in which she lifted a 500-lb. weight, supported three 150-lb. male assistants. She played with Ed Wynn in Sometime, shimmied in Shubert revues, made her name on the Manhattan stage with Diamond Lil, in which she was a genial prostitute. The enormous swan-shaped bed which appeared on the stage in Diamond Lil came from Mae West's home, once belonged to Diamond Jim Brady.

An enthusiastic vulgarian with far better control of her instincts offstage than on. Actress West seldom drinks, smokes denicotinized cigarets. Until she reached Hollywood, she improvised her plays in rehearsal from rough notes; her ambition as a playwright was to win the Pulitzer Prize. Padded in most of her pictures. Mae West's real dimensions are: height 5 ft. 5 in., weight 120 lb., waist 26 in., hips 36 in., bust 36 in. She likes diamonds, rare beefsteaks, racehorses, of which she recently acquired a stable of three. Her next picture for Paramount will be It Ain't No Fun.

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