The New Pictures

The Scoundrel (Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) is the sad tale of a Manhattan publisher and libertine named Anthony Mallare (Noel Coward). Afflicted by a grandiose conception of his own profligacy, Anthony Mallare passes the time he does not spend in bed explaining to his friends that he is worse than they are. When he finally encounters a pure young poetess named Cora Moore (Julie Haydon), he wastes no time disrupting her romance with an aviator. Instead of marrying Cora, Anthony Mallare loses interest in her, takes up with a concert pianist (Hope Williams). Cora Moore calls him a scoundrel, pronounces a malediction on the plane in which he is about to pursue his pianist to Bermuda.

The plane crashes and Anthony Mallare's subsequent misadventures, while still amorous, become metaphysical. Informed by a mysterious voice that he will be unable to rest in his grave unless within a period of 30 days following his demise he can find someone who will weep about it, Anthony Mallare starts hunting for Cora Moore. He finds her just in time to apologize for his misconduct, reduce her to tears, restore her to her aviator, vanish in a thunderclap.

When Screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, weary of the limitations placed upon them by their Holly wood employers, decided to cast, direct and produce their own stories at Astoria, L. I., the industry pricked up its ears. Observers suspected that, while their efforts would lack the polish of Hollywood wares, they might compensate for their deficiencies. First Hecht-MacArthur film. Crime Without Passion, confirmed this view. The second, called Miracle in 49th Street at first, loosely based on Ben Hecht's novel A Jew in Love, and with echoes from his pornographic Fantazius Mallare, had its Manhattan premiere last week. Hailed by critics, The Scoundrel promptly became a subject of dinnertable conversation partly because its cast included people like Noel Coward, Alexander Woollcott, Hope Williams, partly because it was in its own right a remarkable film.

Fully as preposterous as it sounds, the story of The Scoundrel is at once a childish presentation of the theory that virtue is its own reward--which Hollywood producers outgrew years ago--and an attempt to disguise this fact by presenting Manhattan's neurotic literati as bogeymen equipped with malevolence in heroic quantities. The remarkable thing about the picture is that its treatment, cast and direction are sufficiently expert to make this weakness seem almost negligible. In his first screen appearance. Noel Coward gives, to the intermittently clever dialog, the inimitable inflection which can make a line like "That is an ungallant question to which women always expect a gallant answer," sound real. The work of Cameraman Lee Garmes suggests again, as it did in Crime Without Passion, that he may be more essential to the success of their experiment than either Mr. Hecht or Mr. MacArthur.

The Devil Is a Woman (Paramount). Marlene Dietrich is one of the most beautiful and dynamic actresses in Hollywood. Director Josef von Sternberg is an eccentric specialist who enjoys filling his camera lens with shadows, antique furniture, objects d'art and confetti. To most observers, these salient characteristics might suggest that, for the purpose of manufacturing profitable moving pictures, Director von Sternberg and Cinemactress Dietrich constituted less than an ideal partnership. To the executives of Paramount, on the other hand, they justified a series of five pictures (Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress), few of which made any money. The sixth, The Devil Is a Woman, is notable chiefly because, since Director von Sternberg's contract has not been renewed, it terminates this unfortunate alliance by illustrating its disadvantages even more strikingly than its predecessors.

Adapted by John Dos Passos from a novel by Pierre Louys, filmed in Director von Sternberg's best darkly sardonic style, The Devil Is a Woman is a slow, rococo anecdote about the vicious sex-life of a Spanish cafe dancer (Dietrich) and the middle-aged army officer (Lionel Atwill) whose career is shattered by his morbid passion for her. Infinitely more adult in its approach to human values than such a picture as The Scoundrel (see above), this effort by one of Hollywood's most famed directors is correspondingly more childish in its manner. After winding through an interminable succession of overdecorated scenes, in which flashbacks show the progress of the love affair while the elderly lover tells the story of it to his latest and most formidable rival (Cesar Romero), it ends in a sequence which, because Director von Sternberg wanted it to mean one thing for stupid audiences and another for intelligent ones, winds up as a feeble ambiguity. Most tedious shot: Dietrich biting her underlip to express passion.

Air Hawks (Columbia). As a realistic picture of modern commercial aviation, Air Hawks would be hard to take. Fortunately it is nothing more serious than a horror story hoisted aloft and sustained there by familiar mechanisms: a diabolical invention, a lovely cabaret singer used as the dupe of a crew of villains, trap doors, a comedy reporter, murder, young love and a mysterious gang chief photographed from behind, who turns out to be the man you least suspect. Before long the roguish tendencies of the executives of Transcontinental Airways have been stimulated to such a pitch by the refusal of Ralph Bellamy to sell out his tottering independent line that they hire an inventor with a plane-destroying ray to wreck Bellamy planes. Several pilots, screaming unpleasantly, have fallen in flames before Bellamy finds out about the ray machine and bombs it to pieces. Everything is cleared up at the end except the chastity of Miss Tala Birell. Not that anything is wrong, but the tone of voice in which (though it is to save Bellamy) she agrees to go away for a weekend with one of the villains is amazingly casual, nor is this all. Hardly a reel later she accepts with even more alacrity a similar invitation from Bellamy (to whom she is not married) in a scene for which the reporter (Victor Kilian) supplies the fade-out gag. He gives a musical cigaret case to Bellamy with a line to the effect that the possibilities of the trip seem to make the gift appropriate. The tune the gadget plays is "Rockaby, Baby."

G Men (Warner) is James Cagney's best picture since The Public Enemy. An enormously exciting topical melodrama, adapted from the past few years' most violent headlines, it investigates the career of a Department of Justice agent with authenticity, enthusiasm, and enough bloodshed to cause cinema censors last week to consider banning the work from all Chicago theatres, on the ground that it might overstimulate small children.

Brick Davis (Cagney) becomes a G Man (underworld slang for Government Agent) to avenge the murder of his best friend, shot by the confederate of a gangster he was arresting. The first half of the picture is a skillfully arranged advertisement of the Department of Justice school for training its agents, snowing Brick Davis becoming involved in difficulties with his teacher (Robert Armstrong), trying to attract the attention of a girl (Margaret Lindsay) who thinks she dislikes him and doing most of the other things which are part of the Cagney formula. The second half, when Brick Davis' schooling is over, shows the war between a squad of G men and the Leggett gang, a war characterized by incidents which will remind audiences of the Union Station massacre in Kansas City, the unsuccessful attempt to arrest John Dillinger in his St. Paul apartment and finally the siege of the Little Bohemia roadhouse which, as reenacted in G Men, has very different consequences from the death of an agent and the escape of Bandit Dillinger. In G Men, Brick Davis and his companions surround a Wisconsin roadhouse in which the remnants of the Leggett gang are carousing with their women and shoot all of them except Brad Collins (Barton MacLane) whom Davis exterminates privately a few days later, trying to escape to Canada.

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