The New Pictures

Dancing Lady (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A burlesque dancer named Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford) meets a jaunty young socialite named Tod Newton (Franchot Tone). He sees to it that she gets a front line position in the chorus of a deluxe revue. The revue's dance director (Clark Gable) observes that she has talent and enthusiasm, makes her the star.

If the cinema is a trustworthy reporter of life, producing a musical comedy must be a superhuman task. In this picture such difficulties as are to be anticipated crop up in connection with the musicomedy, called Dancing Lady. Gloomy, irascible, gnawed by dark creative fervors, the dance director presently hears that his backer has withdrawn his support because the young socialite wants his inamorata to be, not an actress, but his companion on a trip to Cuba. As vapid a snip as has ever disgraced his class in the cinema, Tod seems vaguely hurt because Janie, when she learns what subterfuges he has used, goes back to the musicomedy which the dance director is financing from his own pocket, helps the opening night to be completely gala.

Though Dancing Lady conforms to the rule that all cinemusicals have the same plot and the same characters, it is not a carbon copy. It is Forty-Second Street in sables. All dance directors in the cinema are serious and frenetic artists but Clark Gable is more morbidly devoted to his routines than Warner Baxter in Warner Brothers musicals. Franchot Tone takes his burlesque girl to his country home with more snobbish head-wagglings than those used for similar purposes by Buddy Rogers in Take a Chance. In her serious characterization of Janie Barlow as an inspired, warm-hearted runaway angel, Joan Crawford makes thoroughly apparent the fact that she is now abler as an actress than as a dancer. Good shots: Robert Benchley as a Broadway colyumist, languidly asking for a pencil; the start of Dancing Lady's flashiest musical number, with Fred Astaire going through routines which Joan Crawford tries to follow.

Sitting Pretty (Paramount) concerns two songwriters, one serious (Jack Haley) and one deluded by conceit (Jack Oakie), who hitchhike from Manhattan to Hollywood, there indulge in romance, alcohol and creative work. Haley becomes attached to a blonde waif (Ginger Rogers) who meets the pair on their way West, follows them to Hollywood. Oakie grows fond of an erratic actress (Thelma Todd), who abandons him when he loses his job.

Sitting Pretty contains two good songs ("Good Morning. Glory," ''Did You Ever See a Dream Walking"), a dance routine with ostrich feathers and an air of total irresponsibility which often makes it definitely funny.

Hoopla (Fox) is a tardy adaptation of Kenyon Nicholson's famed play The Barker, directed by Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade, Berkeley Square) and designed to re-establish the vanished prestige of Actress Clara Bow. She is Lou, hardboiled dancer in a carnival, who, to oblige the mistress of the proprietor (Preston Foster), makes advances to his callow son (Richard Cromwell), ends by marrying the son.

Honky tonks have been treated so exhaustively in the cinema since The Barker that the first squeak of a calliope now sounds like a warning signal of boredom to come. Even a blatant performance by Actress Bow, in the manner of a juvenile Mae West, and an ending which shows her wriggling in the midway of a Century of Progress, fail to prevent Hoopla from seeming obsolete.

The House on 56th Street (Warner). The story of a Manhattan residence. built for a bride in 1905 and re-opened as a speakeasy and gambling den in 1933, could contain material for a first-rate picture. The story of The House on 56th Street fails to do it justice. It is a gloomy but only mildly exciting chronicle about a turn-of-the-century chorus girl whose characteristic for being present at deaths by violence makes the house on 56th Street resemble a shooting box. Peggy Van Tyle (Kay Francis) enters it first as the happy bride of a slick young socialite (Gene Raymond). She is on hand when her onetime lover (John Halliday) shoots himself. Sent to jail for manslaughter, she reenters the house on 56th Street 20 years later as a lady black-jack dealer, plays cards against a grown daughter who has been taught to think her mother dead. When the daughter (Margaret Lindsay) shoots Peggy's partner (Ricardo Cortez) to avoid paying her losses, Peggy is again on hand, ready to take what the cinema calls "the rap." Typical shot: handsome Kay Francis explaining to Margaret Lindsay that "I'm the best friend you ever had."

Son of a Sailor (Warner). When, in this picture, a sailor says to Joe E. Brown. ''I ought to cut your throat from ear to ear," another remarks: "Someone's done it already." This rude allusion to Comedian Brown's appearance should please his admirers. So should his efforts to impress a girl who turns out to be the admiral's daughter; his antics when she takes him home to amuse her father and her fiance, Brown's lieutenant; his attempt to escape by a trellis, which breaks and lets him fall; his eventual departure on the wing of an airplane.

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