The New Pictures

The Big Bad Wolf (Walt Disney). On her way to her grandmother's cottage, carrying a basket of cakes and wine, Little Red Riding Hood passes the Three Little Pigs' establishment. The two inferior pigs, squealing and cavorting as usual while their brother builds an addition to the house, advise Red Riding Hood to use a shortcut through the forest where the Big Bad Wolf spends his time. They accompany her along the shortcut, playing their gay flute and fiddle. When the Wolf , makes his appearance, imperfectly disguised as Goldilocks, the piglets behave as might be expected. They run home and hide under the bed. Red Riding Hood escapes.

At Grandma's, another crisis occurs. The Wrolf chases Grandma and Red Riding Hood into the closet. He is on the point of breaking down the door when the industrious pig arrives and quickly assembles the equipment called for by the situation--a bag of unpopped corn and a frying pan. He warms the corn and pours it into the rear of the Wolfs baggy trousers. The Wolf, convinced that he is being peppered from the rear by a machine gun, scuttles off. The two frivolous piglets arrive in time to join the celebration at Grandma's cottage. The prudent pig pumps the organ for their dance. Major flaw of The Big Bad Wolf is not that it wildly distorts a well known nursery story. This is Disney license. But Disney license is not enough to explain why Frank Churchill, who scored The Three Little Pigs, was not required to compose new music for The Big Bad Wolf. The piglets still pipe the tune by which 1933 will be remembered though by now they should be as tired of it as the rest of the U. S. The wolf, an equally good entertainer, has no song at all. No Greater Glory (Columbia), adapted from Ferenc Molnar's novel Paul Street Boys, is a war picture unlike any other that has come from Hollywood. It concerns the struggle between two groups of Budapest schoolboys--the Paul Street Boys and their larger rivals, the Red Shirts --for possession of a corner lot. Smallest, feeblest, most loyal member of the Paul Street army is Private Nemecsek (George Breakston). The only non-commissioned officer in the organization, he is eager for promotion and tries to earn it one evening on a spying expedition to the Red Shirts' headquarters in the botanical gardens. When he and his companions are observed, Nemecsek has to hide in the conservatory pool. Next day he wakes up with a bad cold, disobeys orders to stay at home, goes on an expedition of his own to retrieve the Paul Street flag. His foray is brave but unsuccessful: the Red Shirts catch and duck him.

By the time the Red Shirts and the Paul Street Boys arrange to have a pitched battle for the vacant lot, Nemecsek has his promotion and an officer's cap but they do him small good. He is in bed with pneumonia, too ill to remember anything except that he will not be on hand to help. It turns out that Nemecsek does not miss the battle. He clambers out of bed, staggers desperately into the thick of the scuffle, jumps at the throat of the leader of the Red Shirts. This feat of valor does more than end the war. When Nemecsek's mother arrives to find her son, small Nemecsek is dead. The next day, a steam-shovel starts digging up the Paul Street lot for the foundation of an apartment house.

The word "pitch" in Hollywood has a special meaning. A picture with high pitch is one like Looking For Trouble, in which the excitement is caused by murder, earthquakes, explosions, the throwing of hand-grenades or grapefruit. Director Frank Borzage (Seventh Heaven, Bad Girl, Farewell to Arms, Man's Castle) is a master of low pitch, a method which in No Greater Glory reflects precisely the wisdom and tenderness of Ferenc Molnar's writing. It is not Nemecsek's last appearance on the Paul Street lot that makes him heroic. It is the way he looks at a frog when he is hiding in the conservatory pool. A brief shot of the incredulous horror in Nemecsek's face when he learns that one of his superior officers is a traitor is enough to suggest the implications of the picture, make the fence around the Paul Street lot a symbol for the walls of Troy. Sorrell & Son (British and Dominions). The hero of this picture, Captain Sorrell (Henry Byron Warner), is an embodiment of patience. When he loses his money and when his wife leaves him for another man, he does not whimper but commences scrubbing floors. He educates his small son (Peter Penrose) in the school of hard knocks but remains a gentleman while employed successively as boots, assistant porter, head porter, hotel manager. Finally he becomes part owner of a country inn. By this time young Sorrell has grown up to be a student surgeon and old Sorrell has what seems to be cancer. He lives to see young Sorrell perform his first major operation and get married. Then he goes into his final decline. Young Sorrell puts an end to his father's miseries with a narcotic overdose. Patience is a peculiarly British virtue and Sorrell & Son, adapted from the best-seller by Warwick Deeping, is a British picture--sad, improving, decent, fictitious. H. B. Warner gives a solicitous, restrained performance. Lydia Hayward's writing is dignified and gentle. Good shot: Sorrell, too ill to walk out of the operating room, watching his son's first operation. Looking For Trouble (Twentieth Century). When Producer Darryl Zanuck made a newspaper picture called Advice to the Lovelorn, Warner Brothers, of which he was once head, made a better one with the same plot, called Hi Nellie. With Looking For Trouble Zanuck turns the tables on Warners' I've Got Your Number, which had to do with telephone repairmen. The repairmen (Spencer Tracy and Jack Oakie) in Looking For Trouble are more efficient detectives than their Warner counterparts; they have more attractive friends (Constance Cummings and Arlene Judge); their wisecracks are superior; they lead more exciting lives. If he were filming the story of Peter Rabbit, Producer Zanuck would doubtless find in it appropriate places for an airplane crash, a seduction and a double gang-murder with machine guns. Looking For Trouble is a typical Zanuck portrait of two interesting industrial peewees; it calls for a raid on a speakeasy, a bank robbery, a fist fight, a three-alarm fire, a front-page murder, a California earthquake. None of these fantastic bits impedes Looking For Trouble. It is a rampant adaptation of the telephone book, which might have alarmed Alexander Graham Bell but should entertain cinema audiences. I Believed in You (Fox). True Merrill (Rosemary Ames), a college professor's daughter with literary leanings, hears from Jim Crowl (Victor Jory), an oily labor agitator, that she should go to Greenwich Village and Learn to Live. She leaves her home among the coalfields and does as he suggests. In Greenwich Village she meets a poet, a painter and a dancer, all Growl's friends and all, like him, incompetent and insincere. True Merrill's only worthy admirer is Michael Harrison (John Boles), a millionaire who subsidizes her Greenwich Village cronies to prove to her that they are no-goods. True Merrill is grateful to Harrison but miserably disillusioned. Her only consolation is the fact that a publisher admires her first novel. A bombastic tirade against tinhorn esthetes, clumsily written and woodenly directed, I Believed in You is noteworthy solely because its 26-year-old leading lady, if she possesses the energy and ability shown by other members of her family, may get somewhere some day. Rosemary Ames's father was Knowlton Lyman ("Snake") Ames, famed Princeton fullback of the Golden Nineties and head of a Chicago investment house, of Booth Fisheries Co. and of the Chicago Journal of Commerce. In mid-Depression, he shot himself. Knowlton Jr. built up the Journal of Commerce for his father, who then turned it over to Son John. Junior Ames bought the Chicago Post, joined Col. "Frank" Knox on the Chicago Daily News, is now Governor Horner's State Finance Director. An Ames cousin is Charles Gates Dawes. Rosemary Ames's first husband was Samuel Insull's private secretary, E. Ogden Ketting. Her second is Bertie Alexander Meyer, London producer. Perhaps he will help her get less wooden direction, help her forget she is Acting.

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