The New Pictures

Black Fury (Warner).

"Joe Radek, he like everybody and everybody like Joe Radek," says the hero of this picture when it starts. Presently, Joe Radek (Paul Muni) learns that he has been mistaken. A Pennsylvania coal miner with nothing on his mind except his girl Anna (Karen Morley), he is so dismayed when she runs off with a company policeman that he gets blind drunk and staggers into a meeting of his union. There a hired agitator, stoolpigeon for a racketeering labor organization whose scheme is to start the strikes that it gets paid to settle, is telling the miners that the heads of their union are double-crossing them. All this means to Joe is a chance for the fight which suits his mood but when he wakes up sober the next morning, he finds himself nominal head of a new organization formed to break the old union. The war between the two labor factions results in a lockout and a strike. When the miners and their children start to starve, when their families are being ousted from Coaltown by the mining company, it becomes apparent that the new union was a cat's-paw and that Joe Radek is responsible for the confusion. An ugly incident prompts Joe to make restitution for his blunder. He encounters two company policemen slugging his best friend to death. The fight that follows sends Joe Radek to the hospital. Warned by his Anna, who comes back to him just in time, that the miners are about to go back to work on unfavorable terms, Joe goes down into the mine with a load of explosives. From the bottom of the shaft he telephones up that unless the miners' demands are met, he will destroy the mine. The company's officials take him at his word. When Black Fury opened in Manhattan last week, it was advertised by its producers and hailed by critics as "courageous." This indicated two sad facts: 1) Hollywood cinemagnates are so pathologically timid that they consider it almost heroic to break their senseless taboo against discussing such matters as labor troubles; 2) cinema critics are so dazed by the long sequence of films showing how love will find a way that, when they encounter anything else, they are unable to decipher it. Actually, Black Fury is not courageous at all. To the body of knowledge about labor disputes, it adds nothing. The strongest message which it aims to impress upon its audiences about such a controversial subject is that much can be said on either side.

Aside from the question of production "courage," Black Fury succeeds superbly in its real aim, which is to be exciting. Its producers say what there is to be said on both sides, particularly the miners' side, with clarity, completeness and adult human understanding. Its subject may make Black Fury one of the most talked of pictures of the year. Michael Curtiz' direction and Paul Muni's superb performance make it one of the most worth-while dramatically. Good shot: Joe Radek getting gaily out of bed.

Star of Midnight (RKO).

Whatever other advantages it may possess, the new type of detective picture is at least likely to help eradicate from the U. S. cinema that traditional scene in which the comedy character begins to hiccup and mispronounce while gulping at his second cocktail. In Star of Midnight, Clay Dalzell (William Powell) starts his day, not with orange juice but with a highball while shaving. He also requires four Martinis, ten stingers, one beer and an unspecified quantity of brandy neat. Through all this drinking he not only maintains perfect sobriety and finds himself encouraged to solve the problem of who killed Gossip Columnist Tommy Tennant but also manages to make himself so charming to his friend Donna Mantin (Ginger Rogers) that nothing will satisfy her except marriage.

The spectacle of Clay Dalzell's suave bar manners are much more stimulating than the mystery which he solves in Star of Midnight, and it will be no surprise to the thirsty audience to learn that a barfly is responsible for the crime. Cinemaddicts who enjoyed The Thin Man, recognized master print for all cocktail and wisecrack crime cinemas, should find Star of Midnight an entertaining and not too sedulous copy. Good shot: Clay Dalzell getting gaily out of bed.

Four Hours To Kill (Paramount)

Is an adaptation by Norman Krasna of his play, Small Miracle (TIME, Oct. 8), which that screenwriter dashed off between pictures a year ago and in which he reduced the Grand Hotel formula to its lowest terms by having most of the important action take place in a telephone booth. The booth, in the lounge of a Manhattan theatre, becomes a convenient place for an escaped murderer (Richard Barthelmess) to hide while waiting to shoot the man responsible for his capture.

In other respects, Four Hours To Kill develops strictly according to the rules of its medium. In and about the lounge are revealed the interlacing stories of the coatroom boy suspected of stealing a diamond pin; the polite gigolo cheating with the wife of the owner of the department store where the coatroom boy's fiancee is a filing clerk; the detective whose daughter is about to graduate from high school; the murderer's antagonist married to the usher who is trying to blackmail the coatroom boy. The neatness of Author Krasna's construction, the pace of Mitchell Leisen's direction and Richard Barthelmess' understanding of the role of a vengeful, stubbornly romantic thug, make Four Hours To Kill a first-rate specimen of its school.

It's a Small World (Fox).

Some lean cows obstructing a muddy Louisiana detour cause the collision of two Chevrolets and the death of one of the animals. Next morning Judge Clummerhorn (Raymond Walburn), patriarch of Hope Center, finds Jane Dale (Wendy Barrie), runaway socialite, and Bill Shevlin (Spencer Tracy), duck-hunting lawyer, huddled, together in the car that has remained upright and apparently hating each other bitterly. Clummerhorn has the cars towed to his garage, lodges the young people in his hotel, arraigns them in his traffic court. When the cow, thinly disguised as veal stew, appears on the hotel's table d'hote that evening, Jane Dale leaves the table. Nor is her appetite stimulated by a legal complication possible in Louisiana whose laws are based on the Code Napoleon. She admits owing Shevlin $60 for parts of his car which she bribed a mechanic to trans fer to hers. Palpably she, a debtor, was attempting to leave the state. According to the law, that situation gives the creditor "custody of the body."

Sworn in as a deputy, Shevlin has complete discretion over Jane Dale. He uses it to take her duck hunting, feed her peanuts, pay her fine when Judge Clummerhorn, as game warden, arrests her for shooting out of season. By the time they are on their way to be married in the one car that has been concocted out of the two wrecks, everything that can be done with the situation of two people stranded in a hick town has been done, effortlessly and good-humoredly, with excellent results as entertainment. If It's a Small World invites comparison with It Happened One Night it need concede priority only in the use of its general structure. Its acrid inconsequent mood is its own. Wendy Barrie's father, a King's Counsel named Jenkin, is a barrister in Hongkong where she was born. Her mother christened her Wendy. She naturally picked Barrie when she needed a stage name. She went to school in Switzerland and was having lunch in London's Savoy Grill with a friend when Alexander Korda saw her, offered her a screen test. Watching her shrewdly with his hat over his eyes and a cigar in his mouth, Korda tactfully taught her how to act. She played the part of Jane Seymour, Henry the VIII's third wife. At Barbara Hutton's wedding in Paris she met Wool worth Donahue, rich Hutton cousin. Last summer they were reported engaged. She arrived in the U. S. six months ago for the purpose of marrying him. But Mrs. Donahue Sr. does not like actresses. Her engagement broken, Wendy Barrie followed Henry VIII's other wives (Merle Oberon, Binnie Barnes, Elsa Lanchester and Everly Gregg) to Hollywood.

She lives in a small house in Whitley Heights, plays much tennis. She is 22 years old, has green eyes, looks taller than her 5 ft., 4 because of her long legs. Anxious not to be thought high hat, she salts her conversation with frivolous profanity. Paramount is having her taught to tap dance so she can work in musicals.

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