The New Pictures

Hollywood Party (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) opens with Jimmy Durante as "Schnarzan the Great," burlesquing Johnny Weismuller in a scene with Lupe Velez (Mrs. Johnny Weismuller). Says Durante: "Beneath this here lion's cloth beats a heart that's seethin' with sentiment." Says Velez: "I'll bet you say that to every animal." Distressed, Durante uproots a tree, beats his chest, yodels through his nose. The picture also contains a plot in which Durante functions as an outdoor cinema star entertaining a visiting big game hunter (Jack Pearl). Durante hopes to use Pearl's lions in his next picture. Guests at the party (Charles Butterworth, Laurel & Hardy, Polly Moran, Frances Williams, Jack Pearl's neanderthal assistants) break eggs on one another's heads, sing, insult one another, bid for a pair of the explorer's lions, watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Produced from a script by Arthur Kober and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's smart Publicity Chief Howard Dietz, who has written Manhattan musical shows for the past five years, Hollywood Party should have been one of the funniest pictures of the season. That most of its antics turn out to be curiously dreary may be due to the fact that cinemusicomedy demands more continuity of plot than Hollywood Party contains; that M-G-M instead of assigning a director to supervise the whole production, had bits made under different directors and assembled the parts when completed. Best line: Butterworth's comment on Durante's party: "This place is littered with movie celebrities -- and that makes some litter." Channel Crossing (Gaumont British). A financier (Matheson Lang) with a Christ-like beard is threatened with ruin when a clerk (Anthony Bushell), in love with his secretary (Constance Cummings), overhears that some of his securities are forged. The financier takes steps to kill the clerk. When he learns that his secretary loves Bushell, he spares the clerk's life and takes his own instead.

To give color and profile to anecdotes which would otherwise seem shapeless the cinema learned an easy trick from Grand Hotel. The mishaps and heroics of Channel Crossing occur on a boat from Dover to Calais. The minor passengers, all garrulous in British accents as thick as the fog that comes down half way across the Channel, are what alert cinemaddicts expect to find in such surroundings: a comic cuckold (Nigel Bruce), a terse captain, a deck steward with a teething baby. Lang performs with too much solemnity, but a sound formula and good acting by handsome Constance Cummings make the picture another British threat to Hollywood. Typical shot: the financier, just after he has taken an overdose of adrenalin, giving the deck steward a -L-5 note.

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