Carnival (Columbia ). Encouraged by the success of Shirley Temple and the requirements of the Legion of Decency, Hollywood producers have recently conducted unprecedented raids on U. S. nurseries and cradles. In the past year, Baby LeRoy (It's a Gift), Frankie Thomas (Wednesday's Child), Georgie Breakstone (No Greater Glory), Jane Withers (Bright Eyes), Baby Jane (Imitation of Life), David Holt (You Belong to Me), Virginia Weidler (Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch), Freddie Bartholomew (David Copperfield) have earned high-bracket incomes which will cease before they reach their adolescence. Carnival introduces the first baby-carriage Booth of 1935, a solemn, bun-faced 3-year-old named Dickie Walters. Since he is still comparatively inarticulate, Dickie Walters in Carnival is required to do little more than swallow cereal and retain his composure when Lee Tracy, blowing in his face, addresses him as "Poochy." He discharges these duties capably, seems less eager to steal scenes than most of his contemporaries, and is therefore star material.

As is usual in the county-fair and side-show cinema, the cast of Carnival includes that familiar breakfast set of human oddities (midgets, bearded lady, fat woman, giant, snake-charmer) who now make a better living by impersonating freaks in pictures than they used to make by really traveling with the circus. The plot concerns the efforts of a widowed puppeteer (Tracy) and his male assistant (Jimmy Durante) to prevent welfare agencies from taking possession of his child; the efforts of his female assistant (Sally Eilers) to make him see that this can easily be accomplished by a second marriage. The inevitable riot scene, in which the carnival personnel squeals "Hey Rube!" and Poochy is left in a tent which catches fire, serves for a climax. Sportswriter Grantland Rice's daughter Florence, who began her acting career as Snow Queen in the Dartmouth Winter Carnival of 1928 does well in a brief sequence as a trained nurse.

All the King's Horses (Paramount). This is designed for people who like uniforms and double-identity scenes and even more for those who like Carl Brisson. He plays both leading roles--King Rudolph, a monarch who leaves his throne to see life, and Carlo Rocco, an actor who substitutes for the King. There are many scenes where Brisson sings to himself, argues, drinks and laughs with himself, filling the screen in all directions with the manly Brisson dimples but managing more than in his earlier pictures to tone down the Brisson mannerisms. A situation develops well toward the middle of the piece when the King's wife (Mary Ellis), who has run away from home because the King's beard tickled, comes back and finds the actor in the King's bedchamber minus beard. Eugene Pallette, as Brisson's stooge, contributes comic relief with gags like: Lord Chancellor: "The Queen's bedroom must remain inviolate." Pallette: "Violet's all right. I just wanted to sleep there."

Paramount has gone to some trouble to prove there is still entertainment in Graustarkian romance. It took two plays, four playwrights and a screen writer with some help from Director Frank Tuttle to supply the story. The music, nice but not gaudy, was rewritten three times, final credit going to Sam Coslow. Best tune: "Dancing the Viennese."

The Right to Live (Warner). When a new actress arrives at a studio, the customary procedure is to put her in a succession of roles as dissimilar as possible, in order to find out in which category she fits best. Having "discovered" pretty Josephine Hutchinson in Manhattan's Civic Repertory Theatre, where she had been functioning for eight years, Warner's first experiment was a musical comedy (Happiness Ahead), in which her by no means untaxing assignment was to spend six reels listening to Dick Powell sing. With this out of the way, a good solid English sex-problem piece, with mullioned windows and C. Aubrey Smith as a friend of the family, was obviously in order. This line of reasoning explains what would otherwise be the somewhat startling revival of Somerset Maugham's sardonic play The Sacred Flame, which has appeared twice in the cinema since its performance on the Manhattan stage in 1928.

The stark narrative concerns a crippled aviator (Colin Clive), his beautiful wife and what naturally happens when the cripple's eminently healthy brother (George Brent) tries to be helpful to them both. Under its surface of gallant behavior and carefully constructed situations, Maugham's play was charged with a cool, premeditated horror which caused most audiences to dislike it. The film develops the superficialities of the story more extensively and resolves its crisis with .suicide instead of murder but it remains an embittered and exciting study of primitive perplexities in polite society. As the invalid's nurse, who has to convey to the audience her jealous love for him and her stoic hatred of his wife in a role almost devoid of lines, Peggy Wood gives the outstanding performance. As the wife, Josephine Hutchinson seems more wisely cast than she was in Happiness Ahead. Her next picture will be Oil for the Lamps of China.

Shadow of Doubt (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) would be a routine program picture were it not for the presence in its cast of Constance Collier, oldtime stage actress. Wearing a white wig, she plays a role which is a weird combination of the late Ella Wendel and all the characters May Robson has contributed to cinema. A recluse in a Manhattan house which she has not left for 20 years, she learns with dismay that her nephew (Ricardo Cortez) loves an actress (Virginia Bruce). Even greater is this grande dame's chagrin when it appears that both nephew and actress are suspected of killing a night-club person. Mobilizing vast resources of wit, charm, and coolheadedness, Miss Collier leaves her house in her electric motor car, competently brings the niggling little mystery to its proper conclusion. A minor mystery to cinemagoers is the nature of the locale of a rough-&-tumble which winds up the picture. Unexplained by any dialog, it resembles a ruined cathedral, is full of rickety scaffolding upon which the male actors fight vigorously.

Crotchety old women who outwit strong men have become a cinema staple. To hers (named Aunt Melissa) Miss Collier brings a patrician nose, a rattly voice and a formidable vivacity out of the fine tradition of the theatre of 30 years ago.

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