The New Pictures

After Tonight (RKO). International spies in the cinema should by this time know better than to fall in love. Invariably a spy's inamorata is also a spy. When the spies find out about each other it usually produces a sadder situation than the one that arises in this picture. Constance Bennett is operative K-14 of Russia. When she is not warming up scraps of paper to make legible their messages in invisible ink she is lolling crisply in the arms of a Viennese secret agent (Gilbert Roland) and saying in her Parkavian voice how much she loves him. Just when it looks as though Miss Bennett, like Greta Garbo in Mata Hari and Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored, will receive attention from a firing squad, an assistant spy shoots the Viennese secret agent severely enough to keep him quiet till the War is over. After Tonight is a slow and thoroughly affected picture, but it contains as much talk about codes as any current editorial page and this helps give it the proper hocus-pocus atmosphere. Good shot: the mutual surprise of Miss Bennett and Gilbert Roland when they meet after the War, he in a station agent's cap, she accompanied by a small, solemn child.

The Prizefighter and the Lady (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The big scene in this picture is a prizefight between Champion Primo Camera and Challenger Max Baer, refereed by Jack Dempsey. In the first round, Baer chases Camera hap- pily around the ring, stinging his long jaw with rattlesnake rights. For the next six rounds, Camera has all the best of it. He lumbers after Baer and knocks him down so frequently that Dempsey announces-- as no referee in a real fight should--"I can't let this go on much longer."* In the tenth round, Baer, revitalized by a glimpse of his estranged wife in a ringside seat, knocks Primo Camera down three times, has him groggy and helpless against the ropes when the bell stops the fight. The decision is a draw. Whether or not a real fight between Baer and Camera, such as may materialize next summer, would have the same result as the one in The Prizefighter and the Lady, this fight is certainly as authentic as any that has yet appeared in cinema. The fact that heavyweight championship fights are usually fought outdoors and for 15, not ten, rounds are minor flaws. If the rest of The Prizefighter and the Lady were as honest and as unaffected as its fisticuffs, it would be a picture too realistic for release. As it stands, the inclusion of Maxie Baer who seems, as usual, completely pleased with himself, helps make The Prizefighter and the Lady a brisk, good-humored and persuasive melodrama. Steve Morgan (Baer) meets Belle Mercer (Myrna Loy) when he is doing roadwork. His manager (Walter Huston) disapproves. So does Willie Ryan, her protector, but, like most gangsters in the cinema, he gives her up without a murmur. After their marriage, difficulties arise between Mr. & Mrs. Morgan because of his philanderings. They have a more peaceful outcome than the difficulties which caused Mrs. Max Baer to divorce her husband last month in Mexico. Director W. S. Van Dyke, who usually makes MGM's animal pictures, was wise enough not to try to make Baer act, allowed him to depend exclusively on a hyperthyroid ebullience which was most appropriate in the scene where Baer, on a vaudeville stage, sang and danced with a female chorus. Man's Castle (Columbia). When Bill (Spencer Tracy) meets Trina (Loretta Young) on the street one night and takes her, because she is hungry and desolate, back to his shack in Shanty Town, he has very little idea of what it will lead to. Little by little he begins to feel responsible for her. As the feeling grows, he resents it, dimly at first, more sharply as he realizes the end of his solitary independence. Trina, too happy in her shack to resent such neighbors as Bragg (Arthur Hohl) a shiftless, thieving drunkard, and a superannuated prostitute named Flossie (Marjorie Rambeau), knows at once what she has found. When Trina tells him she is going to have a baby. Bill marries her, plans to leave her as soon as he and Bragg have robbed the factory where Ira, the night watchman (Walter Connolly), is a friend of theirs. The robbery turns out badly. Bill gets shot but Ira lets him get away. Bragg, hungry for Trina, tries to blame the robbery on Bill, gets shot by Flossie, whose wretched life has made her want to see Bill and Trina happy. At the end of the picture, going away together, Bill and Trina seem to have a chance. With Seventh Heaven, Frank Borzage made himself one of the few U. S. directors whose best work is sufficiently indi- vidual to be easily recognizable. A quality of style, indefinable but based on a gentle, knowing honesty, made important his telling of that story--which Janet Gaynor has been unconsciously burlesquing in most of her later pictures and which even Director Borzage, except in Street Angel, had never seriously rivaled till last week. Man's Castle, with its quiet climaxes and Loretta Young's superlatively sensitive acting, is a picture very nearly as good as Seventh Heaven. Take a Chance (Paramount) exhibits more of the appalling difficulties which, in the cinema, surround any attempt to produce a musical comedy. Four raffish members of an itinerant carnival (James Dunn, Lillian Roth, Cliff Edwards, June Knight) straggle by hook or crook into the cast of a show being produced by an impressionable young socialite (Charles "Buddy" Rogers). After amicable bickerings between Dunn & Roth and Rogers & Knight, and after the efforts of a villainous cafe proprietor to commit the cardinal sin of preventing the show from going on, the first night is a huge success. A handsome and unusually rowdy adaptation of the musicomedy that played in Manhattan last winter, Take a Chance repeats most of the sketches that were successful on the stage. Good new songs: It's Only a Paper Moon, I'm a Night Owl. The Mad Game (Fox) contains interesting data on professional kidnappers. They speak of their victims as "mental cases," incarcerate them in a suburban sanitarium, where the "resident physician" is the most sinister member of their band. Naturally the kidnappers in The Mad Game receive their just deserts. A kindly beer-baron (Spencer Tracy), onetime leader of their gang, whom they have helped send to prison because of his reluctance to be a "snatcher" as well as a 'legger, gets paroled to track them down. Neatly circumventing the Hays organization's antipathy to gangster pictures, The Mad Game would be an even more satis factory revival if it did not revive also such details of the old gangster picture formula as characterization that depends solely on mannerism. Typical shot : a girl reporter (Claire Trevor) arduously rolling her own cigaret.

*Just as improbable was Dempsey's behavior as referee at a heavyweight wrestling bout last week in Alexandria, La. When one of the combatants, Marshall Blackstock, would not quit choking and slugging his opponent, Referee Dempsey stopped him with a right jab that laid open his face.

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