The New Pictures

Ah Wilderness! (Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer). The growing pains of a young generation, tossing uneasily on its antimacassars somewhere in New England, have been expertly woven into this adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play about an adolescent taking his first look at the grown-up world of 1906. Ah Wilderness! is notable also for one of those curiosities of billing that cinema contracts sometimes bring about. Wallace Beery, billed as the star, plays what amounts to an expanded bit-part. He is Uncle Sid, affable and alcoholic parasite who sponges a living in the family of Nat Miller, smalltown newspaper publisher. Nat Miller is played by Lionel Barrymore whose part, though written down considerably from the play, is still an important one and who gets second billing. The real lead (Richard) is Eric Linden, who gets no special billing at all, worked in the picture as a free lance, and was much rejoiced to get a contract out of it.

Richard is the boy who wants to right the wrongs of the Social System in a crushing valedictory address, which is interrupted, amid great applause, at the end of a stereotyped preamble. A brilliant, poetic idealist, he gets into trouble with the father of his girl (Cecilia Parker) because he has given her verses by that renegade, Algernon Charles Swinburne. When he believes that she has spurned his love, Richard samples his first kisses and his first drinks in company with a fast-stepping lady from New Haven, who wears flounces, high-laced shoes, low-slung garters.

Playwright O'Neill, admittedly, was skylarking, insofar as it comports with the dignity of U. S. Playwright No. 1 to skylark, when he got period laughs out of his sentimental little comedy. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich have gone further, using the sound frame of O'Neill's drama as the basis for a period pastiche. It is all there, for people who can think back 30 years: the band concert on the common; the tandem bicycles, shirtwaist watches, lemonade and porch swings; the crested brewery horses, prancing to the political club picnic on the Fourth of July; the bombardment of firecrackers which on that date turned the streets of every U. S. city into miniature battlefields. But even those who do not know what a Stanley Steamer was and never said ''Twenty-three Skiddoo" will still take pleasure in Ah Wilderness!

East of Java (Universal). An ex-gangster named Red Bowers (Charles Bickford) becomes a leader of men when cast ashore on an island off East Africa together with the crew, passengers and cargo, mostly lions, of the tramp steamer Sea Dragon. East of Java was adapted from Gouverneur Morris' Tiger Island by able Screenwriter James Creelman, and regardless of its minor sins against credulity it has a reckless tempo and a tendency for killing off its cast, unusual and charming as a contrast to the current prissy mode of photographing people who sit around on sofas talking imitation Philip Barry.

Moments: A lion mangling a native lute player; a lion tamer going mad with fear when lions, loose and hungry, besiege him and his shipmates in a cave. A moment not composed by Creelman occurred when Tarzan, 3-year-old trained Nubian lion, was startled by the whir of motors in a hidden camera box while Bickford was lying on the ground in front of him. The beast sank its teeth in the actor's neck, shook him, dropped him, leaped on his prostrate body, stood there until scared off. Nine days later Bickford, with his bandages disguised by makeup, got out of the hospital and lay down again in front of nervous Tarzan. Guards with rifles were on hand in case Tarzan, excited by the smell of half-healed wounds, should misbehave again. This time he only sniffed courageous Bickford, played the scene obediently. Bickford played two more scenes necessary to finish the picture, was too sick to take a scheduled part with Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel.

I Dream Too Much (RKO) is an operatic formula picture, cut to fit the coloratura voice, the small, neat form, the pretty face and the sharp French accent of Lily Pons. The operatic basis for its plot is the one which enables Miss Pons to carol Caro Nome from Rigoletto to her provincial music teacher, to make a big splash in Paris, to exhibit her navel in Hindu undress as she negotiates the spectacular Bell Song from Lakme. Introducing a second formula, Henry Fonda, a U. S. musician who thinks he can compose opera, picks up Miss Pons, performs the impossible under France's laws by marrying her during an evening of drunkenness. Under the mistaken impression that his music is better than his wife's voice, Fonda receives a shock when he is ignored at a large party celebrating Soprano Pons's triumphant debut. Taking the usual course for men in his plight, he makes a scene voicing his self-pity as a failure, disappears. Miss Pons, thoroughly bored with lonely success, finds him driving a taxi, turns his bad opera into good musicomedy. Agreeably sung by Lily Pons are four songs by Jerome Kern, including a waltz called I Dream Too Much, Little Jockey on the Carrousel and I've Got Love which the diva has described as a " 'ot song, very 'ot." The picture also introduces blandly comic Eric Blore (Top Haf) and an amiable seal. Good shot: Blore & seal gazing reproachfully at Miss Pons, who has stolen the seal's breakfast fish, cooked it for her husband.

In Old Kentucky (Twentieth Century-Fox), last Will Rogers picture to be released, is in his familiar vein, has a homespun quality evolved with a good deal of necessary modernization from Charles T. Dazey's old stage piece-- the one where the girl puts on jockey clothes, rides Greyboy to victory, wins the Old South medal, and redeems the family fortune. Good humored, unpretentious, In Old Kentucky is somehow more suitable than something grander would have been as the swan song of a man beloved because he created laughter and dispensed with stuck-up ways. If it creaks a bit at times, its gags go far to redeem it, particularly the Race Day sequence when Greyboy, which Rogers has been training as a mudder, has to cope with a fast one called Emperor. A rain maker (Etienne Girardot), with an insane machine which shoots out rockets, is employed to help the horse. Just when everything seems lost a rocket hits a water tank, releasing floods in which old Grey-boy gallops past his rivals. If a box-office record broken by Steamboat Round the Bend means anything, In Old Kentucky may be further proof that Rogers was the first star in cinema history who could draw even better dead than he could alive.

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