The New Pictures

The Great Flirtation (Paramount). A Hungarian actor (Adolphe Menjou), unduly proud of his ability, boasts that he could not play badly if he tried. He marries an actress (Elissa Landi), is jealous of her, sneers at her mediocre mummery. In New York, when through a ruse she has a chance to make a hit. Menjou tries to spoil the play by "mugging." His wife deserts him for a young playwright. Menjou disappears, grows nobly poor and seedy. Wobbling between comedy and sentiment, The Great Flirtation is a raised eyebrow, uncertain and unalluring. Typical shot: the last, in which Menjou and Landi both act brave lies, the worst one winning.

Operator 13 (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) shows the Civil War, lately neglected by the cinema, with MGM improvements. These include the Four Mills Brothers; the flower of the Central Casting Bureau cavorting in ball rooms or on battlefields; cavalry charges directed by Richard Boleslavsky (Way of the Lancer); Marion Davies and Gary Cooper, romantically disguised; a spy plot derived from stories by the late Robert W. Chambers.

The formula for spy stories is always the same, regardless of the war used. Gail Loveless (Marion Davies) meets Jack Gaillard (Gary Cooper) first in Martinsburg, where she is painted as an octoroon. She sees him next at Richmond where she is functioning as a Southern belle. By this time the audience is well aware that Loveless and Gaillard are information agents, he for the South, she for the North. The scene in which Marion Davies says "I love you so" is promptly followed by the one in which a Confederate soldier informs Gary Cooper that she is a spy. Then, true to type, he calls her "cheat" and "liar." Even so, Operator 13 remains a sumptuous melodrama, moody, sensational and elegantly trimmed. Good shot: Marion Davies weeping when she learns that the fiance of her Richmond hostess (Jean Parker) has been killed in a surprise attack for which she is responsible.

Dr. Monica (Warner). To the long list of illegitimate children in the cinema this picture adds one more and little else. The brat who causes the trouble is born to Mary Hathaway (Jean Muir). Its father (Warren William) is the husband of Mary's best friend, Dr. Monica (Kay Francis). While attending the mother, Dr. Monica learns of its parentage from Mary Hathaway's hysterical efforts to telephone the father. For a moment, Dr. Monica proposes to disregard the Hippocratic Oath. The arguments of another friend, present as a spectator, induce her to finish the delivery. Small illegitimate Hathaway gets better breaks than her close relatives. Her mother flies an airplane out to sea for a glamorous suicide. Dr. Monica and her husband, who is still ignorant that he is the father of the child, adopt the infant and seem delighted with her actions. A trivial contribution to the cinema's dossier on bastardy, Dr. Monica serves to demonstrate the versatility of Warner's latest star, Jean Muir. who was the patient-faced farm girl in .45 the Earth Turns, a pioneer's daughter in The World Changes.

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