The New Pictures

The Wedding Night (Samuel Goldwyn). Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper) and his wife (Helen Vinson) return to his inherited Connecticut farmhouse so that he can write a novel undistracted by their Bohemian friends. Their next door neighbors are a family of Polish tobacco farmers whose quaint ways appear to Tony ideal material for a book. When the Poles buy one of his fields, he lets his wife go back to town with the money, settles down to serious research on his subject.

By far the most interesting member of the Nowak family is young Manya (Anna Sten), who presently becomes not only the heroine of Tony Barrett's book but also its inspiration. By the time Dora Barrett comes back, Tony is ready to ask for a divorce but by this time Manya, convinced that her attachment for Tony has reached an impasse, has married the loutish young Pole (Ralph Bellamy) to whom her father has promised her. The situation explodes suddenly on their wedding night. Enraged when he finds Manya weeping and reluctant, her drunken bridegroom rushes out to kill the man he suspects she loves. Manya follows him to the Barretts' house. Trying to separate her husband and Tony Barrett as they scuffle on the stairs, Manya falls. When the two men reach her she is dead.

Because the cinema has so frequently used inapposite happy endings for purely commercial reasons, there is a tendency to regard as artistically courageous any film in which the heroine breaks her neck. Also, since Anna Sten has been introduced to the U. S. public as a glamorous composite of Greta Garbo and Mae West, a picture in which her physical charms are concealed by a mackinaw and a woolen stocking-cap obviously constitutes a daring innovation. The merits of The Wedding Night are more substantial than criticisms which dwell on these superficial factors may lead cinemaddicts to suppose. A sober, admirably realistic investigation of the futility of the back-to-the-soil movement among Manhattan's literati, it is written with honesty and humor, acted with understanding, made exciting by King Vidor's intelligent direction. Good shot: Taka, Tony Barrett's absconding Japanese houseboy, tiptoeing across a field of snow.

Gold Diggers of 1935 (Warner) should go far toward verifying the suspicion that Director Busby Berkeley's bizarre cinematic dance routines have lost all but academic interest. His masterpiece this time is a tableau in which a double row of white pianos, at which chorus girls sit waving their hands as though playing waltzes, waver, spin, undulate and finally assemble into a platform on which Gloria Stuart does a tap dance. Cinemaddicts who feel that this represents a perceptible improvement on Berkeley's shadow waltz in Gold Diggers of 1933 are likely also to enjoy the presentation of the best song in the picture, "Lullaby of Broadway," in which Winifred Shaw's head is suddenly and with ghastly effect imposed as a transparent silhouet over an airplane photograph of Times Square.

The story which these production numbers interrupt, more witty and ingenious than its predecessors, shows a pair of rascally theatrical entrepreneurs (Adolphe Menjou and Joe Cawthorn) engaged in fleecing a stingy dowager (Alice Brady) who hires them to produce a charity show on a shoestring. Dick Powell, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Hugh Herbert and Dorothy Dare appear in their usual capacities, help put the production on a grander scale than anything ever seen outside a Warner sound stage. Trick shot: an unidentified tap dancer's feet photographed from below, through a glass floor.

Princess O'Hara (Universal). When Old Man O'Hara, driver of a horse hack, is accidentally killed in a Manhattan taxi war, his daughter Princess (Jean Parker) blames Toledo (Chester Morris). The audience is rapidly made aware that Toledo has the golden heart traditional for mobsters in that blend of Hans Christian Andersen and Broadway which is a Damon Runyon story. Leon Errol and Vince Barnett are the gorillas detailed by their boss to see that life flows smoothly for the Princess, a task made difficult because she resents any benefactions sponsored by Toledo. Faced with the problem of getting her a new hack horse, they hire a professional horse thief from a Madison Square Garden rodeo. He is a desk cowboy with wild eyeballs who in the picture's most hilarious sequence steals the year's outstanding race horse, Gallant Godfrey. Things go on like this until the climax at the race track. Gallant Godfrey, returned to his owner, runs against Toledo's horse and makes everybody happy by losing.

Scenarists Doris Malloy and Harry Clork needed and used every trick of their trade to expand a fragment of atmospheric writing by Runyon into an agreeable full-length feature. The excellent Manhattan exteriors, including the Plaza Hotel and Central Park, are not glass process shots but well selected bits of San Francisco.

Liliom (Erich Pommer). This adaptation of Ferenc Molnar's famed play, with French dialog and English subtitles, is notable for two reasons. Its director was Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis). Its star is Charles Boyer, who, after a comparatively inconsequential sojourn in Hollywood, returned to France a year ago and promptly became its leading matinee idol.

As the raffish vagabond who considers it beneath his dignity to take a job as janitor and prefers to mistreat his mistress while she supports him, Boyer supplies precisely that mixture of cruelty and innocence which is required to make Liliom a sympathetic character. Director Lang's treatment of the story brings out the quality of rueful fantasy which Author Molnar put into the play and which was so notably absent from the U. S. screen version in which Charles Farrell appeared (TIME, Oct. 20, 1930). Characteristically imaginative is Lang's use of puppets--usually a detriment to any cinema--in the interlude which shows Liliom, after feebly attempting to commit first robbery and then suicide, visiting Heaven before he comes back to Earth to beg forgiveness of Julie (Madeleine Czeray).

No kin to Singer Lucienne Boyer, Charles Boyer is the son of a country merchant who had him taught to play the violin, encouraged his taste for writing and directing plays which he and his small friends acted in a granary. Early in the War, Boyer, at 15, ran an amateur company to entertain soldiers. On his visit to Hollywood in 1932, he played a chauffeur in Red-headed Woman, bit parts with Ruth Chatterton, Claudette Colbert. After building up his prestige abroad, he returned last year, made Caravan, went home again because he considered the next role offered him unworthy of his talents.

He likes skiing, skating, bobsledding. at which he is proficient enough to negotiate Switzerland's Cresta Run. He still wears the heavy gold identification bracelet his mother gave him when he was mobilized for Army duty in 1917. In Hollywood, where he still finds cinema work more satisfactory than in France, Charles Boyer last week finished acting in Paramount's Private Worlds, with Claudette Colbert. Last fortnight, rehearsing a scene which called for him to topple into an orchestra pit, he broke two ribs.

Let's Live Tonight (Columbia). A gay bachelor (Tullio Carminati) sings a waltz to a young girl (Lilian Harvey) whom he picked up in the Casino, took aboard his yacht. Fearing he loves her honestly, he sails away alone without telling her why. When he returns, the girl has agreed to marry his brother. Clearing the matter up takes much dialog and some music. Best shot: the final one, in which the heroine hears the theme song, "Love Passes By," played by a hurdy-gurdy, tooted on an automobile horn, sung by a beautician, a gardener and Carminati.

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