The New Pictures

Curly Top (Fox). Elizabeth Blair (Shirley Temple) and her sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson), inmates at the Lakeside Orphanage, so endear themselves to the richest member (John Boles) of the board of trustees that he decides to relieve the tedium of a summer at Southampton with his good-humored elderly aunt by adopting them. Little Elizabeth's diversions of frolicking about with her pony and duck, teasing the English butler, dancing and singing in amateur theatricals are thereafter interrupted only once. This is when her older sister and her guardian, being too inhibited to confess their love for each other of their own accord, make it necessary for Elizabeth to break the ice between them.

To appreciate Shirley Temple's current position in the cinema industry it is merely necessary to imagine for a painful instant what her absence might have made of a vehicle which, because of her presence, be comes passable entertainment. She is scarcely ever off the screen in Curly Top, executes so many of her specialties that for her confirmed admirers the picture should be the most effective of the rapid series of four she has made since becoming a star last winter. In the course of her impersonation Shirley Temple sings two songs (Animal Crackers in My Soup, When I Grow Up), impersonates Whistler's mother, rides piggyback, does a solo tap-dance on a piano top, learns how to use a finger bowl. Her bridge work, replacing a baby tooth lost last spring, is unnoticeable.

Diamond Jim (Universal) presents a full-length portrait of its hero which is notable both for likeness and for style.

Born just before the Civil War, James Buchanan Brady grew up near New York's Bowery to become the most arresting figure in the bizarre night life of Broadway at the turn of the century. The picture, handsomely produced by Edmund Grainger, sketches his boyhood and then concentrates on his extraordinary career as gourmet, patron of the stage, stockmarket impresario and teetotaler that followed his overnight switch from New York Central "baggage smasher" to major-league railroad supply salesman. Since Brady's life is a legend, Playwright Preston Sturges, who did the screen play from Parker Morell's biography, wisely included apocryphal as well as factual details. Brady (Edward Arnold) is shown ordering a twelve-course dinner and meeting the youthful John L. Sullivan at a cafe; on the same night he is so overwhelmed by hearing Lillian Russell sing for the first time that he buys her $100 worth of roses. If his relations with both Lillian Russell (Binnie Barnes), who refused to marry him because it might spoil their friendship, and Jane Matthews (Jean Arthur), who refused because she was in love with his best friend, are shown as childishly innocent, this bow to censorship does not seriously impair the picture's conception of its hero as a vain, generous, clever, sentimental bon vivant, capable of committing suicide by eating too many oysters. It is a warm and genial period piece which reaches its maximum distinction in that scene in which Edward Arnold, making the most of one of the fattest parts that it has ever been the good fortune of a Hollywood character actor to achieve, shows Brady effectively consoling himself for the collapse of his romance with Jane by setting to work alone on a wedding supper ordered for 100 guests.

Edward Arnold, whose real name is Guenther Schneider, was born in 1890 in Manhattan. His father, a German furrier, died when he was 11, his mother when he was 15. At 11 he was apprenticed to a wholesale jeweler, but truant officers made him quit. He worked as a newsboy, bellhop, janitor's assistant at Columbia University until he graduated from amateur theatricals at an East Side settlement house into touring in Shakespeare with the Ben Greet Players. Neither this nor playing juvenile leads with Ethel Barrymore convinced Edward Arnold that he had any future as an actor. He tried selling insurance and traveling in wholesale groceries. In 1916 he was playing leads with Essanay Film Co. in Chicago. Thereafter, his luck failed in cinema and he spent 15 years as a character actor on the Manhattan stage until his work in a Coast company of Whistling in the Dark got him a few small parts in Hollywood in 1932. His performance as a bibulous millionaire in Sadie McKee last year was a cinema classic. Producer B. P. Schulberg currently pays him $ 1,000 a week on a yearly basis, lends him to outside producers like Edmund Grainger who give him much more for short engagements.

For his work as Brady, Universal paid Edward Arnold $5,000 a week, ordered him to fatten up. Eating is Actor Arnold's only hobby. In his dressing room, the only one on the Universal lot with a private kitchen, he consumed enormous lunches of boiled beef with horseradish sauce, crawfish, Wiener Schnitzel and beer. He took pleasure in eating on the set, put on 15 lb. while the picture was in production. At the Beverly Crest house where he lives with his wife and three children, and where each piece of furniture is tagged with a brass plate giving the name of the play from which he earned money to buy it, he is now engaged in removing the 15 lb., a task made difficult because he never exercises.

Actor Arnold met "Diamond Jim" Brady twice -- once when introduced to him by Ethel Barrymore, again when he was playing with Maxine Elliott. Said Brady: "Well, young man, I hope that some day you'll have a big part." Dante's Inferno (Fox). See ten million sinners writhing in eternal torment . . . cringing under the Rain of Fire . . . consumed in the Lake of Flames . . . struggling in the Sea of Boiling Pitch . . . toppling into the Crater of Doom . . . wracked by agony in the Torture Chambers . . . PLUS THE MOST SPECTACULAR CLIMAX EVER CONCEIVED!

Since no Federal statute governs the claims which cinema producers may make for their efforts, these statements which appeared last week on behalf of Dante's Inferno were legally permissible though they had little or nothing to do with the actual contents of the picture. Dante's Inferno is not only not about Hell but it also has no connection with Dante, save for the fact that a subsidiary character owns a copy of that Italian's works. It is, on the contrary, a modern morality play showing how a carnival concessionaire (Spencer Tracy) works up to the status of amusement tycoon by dishonest means which cause his wife (Claire Trevor) to go off for a holiday.

While Dante's Inferno was in production, Fox pressagents flooded theatrical pages with statistics. Literate U. S. cinemaddicts learned that it was necessary to move all other sets off the Fox lot in order to make room for Hell, which was elaborately designed by Willy Pogany and which took 4,950 "technicians" to execute; that 250 electricians were actively engaged during the shooting of scenes showing Hell in operation; that 3,000 extras functioned as lost souls and that, since it would otherwise have been necessary to hire 300 make-up artists, these actors were coated with paint, like automobile bodies, by means of a spray machine; that it took 16 months and 300,000 feet of film to make the picture.

The results of these extravagances are contained in one short and ludicrously misplaced interlude in the narrative, showing the concessionaire's gloomy old uncle-in-law (Henry Walthall) flipping the pages of his favorite book while summarizing incorrectly Dante Alighieri's purposes in writing it. One of the illustrations suddenly begins to wiggle and for 15 minutes thereafter the screen is smeared with Producer Sol Wurtzel's confused ideas of the hereafter.

Man on the Flying Trapeze (Paramount). In this picture, which contains no trapeze, W. C. Fields is a crestfallen, fantastically good-natured householder named Ambrose Wolfinger surrounded by a shrewish second wife, a mother-in-law, a lazy, unpleasant brother-in-law, a daughter by a first marriage. He makes apple-jack in his cellar, which one night is invaded by burglars who get tipsy, start to sing. When Mrs. Wolfinger wakes Ambrose, orders him to investigate, he inquires: "What are they singing?" The answer is not the name of this film.

Ambrose Wolfinger is useful to his employer because he remembers every foible and family tie of important clients, and is almost impossible to fire because in his confused files no one but he can find anything. To get his first afternoon off in 25 years to go to a wrestling match, he tells his boss he must attend his mother-in-law's funeral. Delayed by sarcastic traffic policemen, a truculent chauffeur and a runaway tire, he reaches the match just in time to be felled by the flying form of a wrestler who has been thrown not only out of the ring but out of the building. Battered, he reaches home to find his mother-in-law story taken so seriously that the house is full of floral tributes and newspaper headlines ascribe the death to poisoned liquor. An abrupt reversal of the situation, started by Ambrose's powerful punch to his brother-in-law's jaw, ends with his onetime tormentors in utter subjugation and Ambrose enjoying a raise in pay and a four-weeks' vacation.

Man on the Flying Trapeze will please those Field cultists who are satisfied if that excellent comedian is visible and audible almost all the time. The Irish in Us (First National). Cinemaddicts have learned that, in a picture in which both James Cagney and Pat O'Brien appear, Pat O'Brien is apt to fall clumsily in love with a girl whom James Cagney, wrinkling his nose, putting his handkerchief to his mouth and fingering his cheekbone, will take away from him. The Irish in Us follows the pattern except that, since it is full of sentiment and soft music, the rivals perform with an unaccustomed restraint which at times approaches boredom.

O'Brien, a policeman, Frank McHugh, a fireman, and Cagney. no occupation, are brothers watched over by an extremely Irish mother (Mary Gordon) whose brogue is so strong that, to the possible improvement of the picture, half her lines are virtually unintelligible. What entertainment the picture provides is mostly due to the antics of McHugh and Allen

Jenkins, an eccentric boxer whom Cagney decides to manage and for whom he successfully substitutes in a championship fight.

Every Night at Eight (Paramount) is the cinema's first effort to dramatize the current radio craze for "amateur hours." It concerns the efforts of three ambitious factory girls (Patsy Kelly, Alice Faye and Frances Langford) who, itching to squeak through microphones, form a partnership with an equally ambitious leader (George Raft) of a CWA band, become famed as the Swanee Sisters.

What makes this trivial investigation of a painful subject more entertaining than most musicomedies is that it: 1) offers a variation, however slight, on the backstage epic; 2) includes a diversity of subsidiary entertainment features, climaxed by the efforts of Florence Gill as an imitator of chicken noises; 3) offers Patsy Kelly the first chance the cinema has given her to prove that she is probably the most expert specialty comedienne in Hollywood.

As the sardonic member of the Swanee Sisters, she accompanies the action with a running fire of contemptuous comment on Raft, the radio, the Swanee Sisters' sponsor, a socialite party which the Sisters attend when they tire of Raft's monastic regulations of their conduct, worldly success in general. When the Swanee Sisters have executed a bewildering overnight rise from penniless unemployment to cabaret celebrity, Patsy Kelly is less pleased than truculently suspicious and, when a waiter hands her a caviar canape, her dissatisfaction is complete. "What good is caviar?" she demands hoarsely. "It tastes like buckshot soaked in axle grease." Good songs: Take It Easy, I'm in the Mood for Love.

Java Head (Basil Dean) is a conscientious transcription of Joseph Hergesheimer's novel about a New England sea captain and the Manchu Princess he married and brought back from China to early 19th Century Salem. That it is much less exciting on the screen than it was between book covers is due partly to the fact that its English producers fell down badly in the matter of sound recording and partly to the mistake of its U. S. director, J. Walter Ruben, in his apparent supposition that lethargic pace was the proper cinema equivalent of Author Hergesheimer's peculiar prose style. As Taou Yuen, Anna May Wong, who last year appeared in an English screen version of Chu Chin Chow, gives a performance so admirable that it may serve to remind Hollywood producers that it is high time she returned for good.

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