The New Pictures

Broadway Through a Keyhole (Twentieth Century) was the cause of last summer's most widely publicized Hollywood brawl. Gossip that incidents in the picture resembled incidents in the career of Dancer Ruby Keeler caused Miss Keeler's husband, Mammy Singer Al Jolson, to punch Colyumist Walter Winchell, who suggested the story to Producer Darryl Zanuck (TIME, July 31). Broadway Through a Keyhole shows Crooner Jolson's grounds for fisticuffs were inadequate. The heroine of the picture (Constance Cummings) works at a night club run by a harridan named Tex Kaley (Texas Guinan). Ruby Keeler was once one of Texas Guinan's "little girls," but this parallel would not be enough to make any cinemaddict mistake the heroine or any of the other characters in the picture for real people. The heroine is a goodie-goodie chorus girl, patterned after the roles Miss Keeler takes in Warner Brothers musicals. A silent gangster (Paul Kelly) with a heart of gold befriends her, falls in love with her, loses her bravely to a suave crooner (Russ Columbo). The plot's conventionality is really an advantage because it is unobtrusive framework for pleasant songs by Columbo, Cummings and Frances Williams, dances by the chorus of Tex Kaley's night club. Good shot: A frantically earnest dance director (Gregory Ratoff) urging his protegees to behave like elves.

College Coach (Warner). The problems that confront Coach Gore (Pat O'Brien) in this picture--an attempt to buy real estate and sell it to Calvert College for a new stadium; the interest Mrs. Gore (Ann Dvorak) shows in a ringer halfback; the resentment of Calvert's best player (Dick Powell) when he gets passing marks he does not deserve --are far more interesting than the locker-room orations and kindergarten campus antics with which Hollywood usually pays its respects to football every autumn. The picture fits less into the category of a juvenile sporting print than into the group of quick, journalistically written thumbnail biographies which Warners have made their specialty for the last two years. Smart dialog by Manuel Seff and Niven Busch help make it adult entertainment.

The World Changes (Warner). In the list of Hollywood indispensables, the date of Oct. 24, 1929 ranks high. The stockmarket crash is to unhappy endings what the NRA has recently become to conclusions of regeneration, and it has never had more disastrous consequences than it does upon the Nordholm family in this picture. Granddaughter Nordholm is left waiting at the church. Her brother, bothered about stealing money to play the market, takes ship for South America. His father commits suicide because he learns that his wife is misbehaving. Mean Mrs. Nordholm calls up her lover but he is too distressed by losses to aid in her crisis. Uncle Nordholm gets drunker than usual and insults a prelate. To top it all, the whole affair reminds Grandfather Nordholm (Paul Muni) of the day his wife went crazy so he dies also, of a heart attack.

Except for its absurdly calamitous conclusion, The World Changes is a fairly satisfactory example of a full-length biographical film, illustrating the familiar theme that pioneer blood runs thin in cities. It details the life story of a Chicago meat tycoon with great solemnity and some skill until Grandfather Nordholm's weak dependents are so elaborately entangled in the plot that it takes a panic to remove them. One test of a cinemactor's flexibility is his ability to grow old gracefully. Mobile-faced Paul Muni does it so skilfully that his talents are likely to remain partially concealed by false whisk ers for some time to come. At least a reel too long, The World Changes could have been painlessly abbreviated if Director Mervyn LeRoy had been less firmly convinced that the most commonplace line will attain force if repeated three times.

Broken Dreams (Monogram). With the air of presenting new thoughts on a vital everyday problem, this picture investigates certain unhappy developments in the domestic life of a young Dr. Morley (Randolph Scott). When his first wife dies in childbirth, he leaves his son to be reared by relatives in a pet-shop. When he marries again, he removes the moppet (Buster Phelps) to his own home, where the child annoys his stepmother (Martha Sleeper). Finally one evening the moppet fractures his skull in a fall sustained while pulling the coattails of a caller who is kissing Mrs. Morley. The strange lack of focus with which the story of Broken Dreams was conceived, written and even photographed is so marked that you are glad rather than surprised when this odd mishap serves as the excuse for a conclusion. Typical shot: small Buster Phelps picking at his food. Cradle Song (Paramount). Maternal love--a theme most often illustrated in the cinema by prostitutes and their illegitimate progeny--is here treated in more thoughtful if equally sentimental fashion. Sister Joanna (Dorothea Wieck), broken-hearted at leaving her small brothers and sisters to enter a convent, is consoled one day when someone leaves a baby in a basket at the convent door. She constitutes herself caretaker to small Teresa, takes it for granted that the babe will be a nun when she grows up. Instead, 17 years later, Teresa meets a handsome young engineer. They go away, to get married and Sister Joanna's heart is broken again.

Adapted by Marc Connelly and Frank Partos from Gregorio Martinez Sierra's most famed play, Cradle Song is a gentle and touching little chronicle, free from that unctuous solemnity which the cinema usually affects for the interior of any religious institution, and hampered mainly by the fact that stories in which nothing happens except vespers are not essentially good cinema material. In her English-speaking debut, Dorothea Wieck (the school-teacher in Maedchen in Uniform) gives a cool, delicate and wisely reticent performance.

Great-great-granddaughter of Composer Robert Schumann, Dorothea Wieck was discovered by Max Reinhardt. She broke her contract with him to play in German cinema. Equipped with a blonde wig and given leads in light comedy, she became Germany's Mary Pickford, showed few signs of becoming something better. In 1928, at 20, Actress Wieck retired from the cinema, returned to the stage. When Karl Frolich, one of the producers of Maedchen in Uniform, calling on Miss Wieck's father in Berlin, saw an old picture of Dorothea without the wig, he gave her the part of Fräulein von Bernburg. The picture--completed in less than a month in the spring of 1931-- caused Paramount to import Dorothea Wieck last April. She likes cheese for breakfast, dislikes U. S. whiskey, writes daily letters, sometimes 35 pages long, to Baron Ernst von der Decken, whom she married just a year ago.

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