The New Pictures

As the Earth Turns (Warner). This semirealistic story of farm life, adapted from Gladys Hasty Carroll's novel, shows New England apple snatchers scratching at their arid meadows, bravely but without much recompense. One full year with the Shaw family and their neighbors makes rural life seem as lively as a cycle on Broadway. In the winter the Polish Janowskis move into the barn next door, Brother George Shaw's cow dies and Step-daughter Doris, who wants to go to Boston, yowls when told to stay at home. In the spring, young Jen Shaw (Jean Muir) falls in love with Stan Janowski (Donald Woods) and Brother George's wife prepares to run away. In the summer young Ollie Shaw flirts with Doris and Brother George Shaw's children get the croup. In the autumn Ollie is sent away to town. In the winter Doris flirts with Stan while his barn burns. The spring is a peaceful season. Doris is about to go away with Stan, George Shaw's wife starts to have another baby and Mark Shaw (David Landau) declines an invitation to the movies from his daughter Jen. Before summer comes again, Jen and Stan are in the buggy, on their way to church.

Moments in this red-lettered farmers' calendar escape the curious uncertainty which characterizes most of Hollywood's conscientious efforts to investigate the soil: gluttonous George Shaw asking his tired wife for another piece of pie; Jen Shaw coming out of the schoolhouse one winter afternoon, when Stan Janowski's sleigh is waiting. Heat Lightning (Warner). This small investigation of goings-on at a desert gas-station is sharper and more honest than most one-room melodramas manufactured in Hollywood. Under Mervyn Le Roy's perceptive direction there are vigorous and amusing sequences: the arrival, en route from Reno to the coast, of two nervous, overdressed divorcees with their languid chauffeur (Frank McHugh ) ; an itinerant bankrobber's bashful greeting to a brash female hitchhiker; a Mexican peasant apologizing for the Ford which contains his wife, children, chicken coop and guitar. Aline MacMahon ably portrays the proprietress, a calm, ugly, unhappy woman gloomily trying to conceal her emotion when brought face to face with a man she is trying to forget. Ann Dvorak plays her young sister, infatuated with a poolroom loafer in the nearest village. What prevents Heat Lightning from being a first rate picture is that it lacks neatness of design. Good shot: the gas-station and the road beyond illuminated by a flash of heat lightning -- which serves no other purpose than to give the picture its title.

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