The New Pictures

She (RKO). A cynic might argue that the activities undertaken in the name of science in the cinema are not more absurd than those undertaken in the name of science in reality. It would not be an easy argument to win. In She, for example, the dying physicist, who is as essential to this school of film as the corpse to a murder mystery, announces a hypothesis that life may be indefinitely prolonged in a human being by broiling him over a phenomenally hot flame. With this point firmly in mind, the scientist's nephew Leo Vincey (Randolph Scott) and his associate (Nigel Bruce) begin paddling off to the Siberian wilds where a family legend indicates that an ancestor named John Vincey encountered such a flame 500 years before. Thereupon She ceases to be concerned with test tubes and laboratory riddles, becomes an honest and ingratiating example of the pipe-dream cinema, full of glaciers, cannibals, underground kingdoms, mystic vapors and supernatural dilemmas calculated to arouse in audiences a mixture of amazement and despair.

First, the Vincey expedition meets a wild British fur trader living in a snow hut with his lovely daughter Tanya (Helen Mack). Next they find old John Vincey's body sealed in a glacier, like a lamb chop in aspic. Hacking at the glacier the fur trader starts an avalanche. The avalanche opens up the entrance to an underground kingdom where Leo, his associate and Tanya are assaulted by cannibals, lugged off in time's nick to a porphyry castle, where a queen named She (Helen Gahagan) mistakes Leo Vincey for his ancestor, explains that she has been in love with him for 500 years. The hospitality at the castle is good; the Queen's character, bad. When she tries to dump Tanya into a cauldron, Leo Vincey rescues her, runs away. He and his associates find themselves trapped in the cave of the mystic flame. The Queen jumps into the flame to show Leo that it will do him no harm. Instead of rejuvenating her, it turns her into an old lady. Muttering, in effect, "What am I up against?" she wilts to the ground. The Vincey expedition starts for home.

Admirers of the late Sir Henry Rider Haggard will observe that She is a rough adaptation of his novel, written in 1887. Equally apparent is the fact that the narrative is less immune than its heroine to the ravages of time. A sequel to King Kong and other such RKO extravaganzas, marred by idiotic dialog and the wooden acting of Randolph Scott, it can be recommended only to cinemaddicts who find bizarre landscapes and immense improbable interiors adequate substitutes for genuinely imaginative fantasy. Typical shot: She's No. i henchman (Gustav von Seyffertitz) ducking his head and mumbling prayers when Leo Vincey shows him a talisman inherited from old John Vincey's widow.

Front Page Woman (Warner). Ellen Garfield (Bette Davis), crack reporter of the Star, scoops her fiance Curt Devlin (George Brent), crack reporter of the Express, on the murder of a theatrical producer. Thereafter, the two engage in a good-humored but energetic rivalry. Curt Devlin first gets an advantage by identifying the mystery woman in the case from the perfume on the dead man's coat. Then Ellen Garfield catches up by finding the woman's whereabouts by means of a laundry mark. Finally their efforts to outwit each other lead to a sequence in which, before the jury has announced its verdict in the trial, the presiding judge is flabbergasted to find it prematurely bannered in both the Star and the Express, in headlines which flatly contradict each other.

There is nothing particularly original about Front Page Woman. Nonetheless, brightly written, eminently well played and directed for comedy values by Michael Curtiz, it is distinctly better than average entertainment. Good shot: Ellen Garfield trying to explain to her city editor that her flash on the outcome of the trial was incorrect.

Mad Love (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This adaptation from Les Mains d'Orlac by Maurice Renard is one of the most completely horrible stories of the year. It presents Peter Lorre as a maniac surgeon who can do anything with a scalpel but nothing at all with Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), an actress who has no use for him because she loves her pianist husband, Stephen (Colin Clive). When Stephen's hands are mangled in a railroad wreck, Dr. Gogol (Lorre) replaces them with the hands of a murderer who has that day been guillotined. Thereafter the hands of Orlac give evidence that the transfer has done nothing to impair the knack for knife-throwing which was the obsession of their original owner.

Lorre, perfectly cast, uses the technique popularized by Charles Laughton of suggesting the most unspeakable obsessions by the roll of a protuberant eyeball, an almost feminine mildness of tone, an occasional quiver of thick lips set flat in his cretinous, ellipsoidal face. It is not conducive to sound sleep to watch him operating on little girls, shuddering with sadistic thrills at public executions, or slavering over the wax image of Mme Orlac which he keeps in his apartment. One of the best scenes in the picture is the maniacal matter-of-factness of Lorre's drunken housekeeper who, finding Mme Orlac at the front door, takes for granted that she is the wax image come to life, shoos her upstairs to the chamber where she is trapped by Lorre and, subsequently, rescued by the police and her vengeful husband. Even the music that bursts forth for the lovers' reunion has its chilling overtones, for nothing has been done about the hands of Orlac. They are still, as he clasps his wife to his breast, the hands of the guillotined knife-thrower.

Lady Tubbs (Universal). When at the start of a film well-informed cinemaddicts are introduced to a character named "Ma" Tubbs whose job is cook for a railroad construction gang, whose favorite expletive is "you tie-jumping son of a tarantula" and whose niece is in love with the scion of an aristocratic Long Island family, they should know what to expect. "Ma" Tubbs (Alice Brady) will inherit $500,000, acquire superficial culture and, coached by a democratic Englishman (Alan Mowbray), will dazzle suburban society under a pseudonym. The crisis of "Ma" Tubbs's career will arrive when circumstances force her to demonstrate her incompetence as an equestrienne by taking part in a fox hunt. She will turn this defeat into a victory by proving that her snobbish hosts are really no more aristocratic than she is, and by marrying her mentor, who turns out to be a lord.

In his anxiety on the one hand to recapture the mood and restate the message of Ruggles of Red Gap and on the other to establish Alice Brady, somewhat prematurely, as a successor to the late Marie Dressier. Producer Stanley Bergerman overlooked the obvious fact that Depression has made social snobbery, as a target for superficial satire, thoroughly obsolete. Consequently, watching Lady Tubbs has at times the effect of listening to someone tell, under the impression that it is new, a joke which his audience has already half-forgotten. Its best moments as a farce are due to intermittently amusing dialog and the fact that Alice Brady makes a genuine characterization out of a role which for almost any other actress could have been only an extended exercise in mugging.

Typical shot: Mrs. Ash-Orcutt denouncing '"Ma" Tubbs's niece to a circle of friends, because ". . . she works!"

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