The New Pictures

Dangerous (Warner). After innumerable backstage musicomedies leading the U. S. public to admire the typical Broadway actress as something in the nature of Elsie Dinsmore wearing tap shoes, this picture is an undertaking in which Warner Brothers generously exhibit the reverse of the medal, ornamented by the likeness of a stage lady of a different type. Joyce Heath (Bette Davis) is a minor-league Duse whose talents are impaired by a fondness for drink, lechery and offstage exhibitionism. She drives her husband to despair, causes a young architect (Franchot Tone) to jilt his fiancee (Margaret Lindsay), and wrecks his high-priced roadster on a tree. This produces a concussion and remorse, in which Joyce Heath abandons her bad ways.

A second-rate picture with first-rate trimmings, the fundamental absurdity of Dangerous is partially disguised in the suave dialog written for it by Laird Doyle and by the presence of Bette Davis, currently Hollywood's No. 1 impersonator of femmes fatales, whose wicked eye-poppings outdo those with which she made her reputation in Of Human Bondage. Typical shot: Franchot Tone muttering, "It can't go on like this."

If You Could Only Cook (Columbia). A light-hearted variation on-the theme of Cinderella, the picture concerns a jobless girl (Jean Arthur) who picks up a young man (Herbert Marshall) on a park bench and, unaware that he is the president of Buchanan Automobile Co. on the lookout for novel recreation, persuades him to pose as her husband so that they can apply for cook and butler work together. Their employer turns out to be a genial racketeer (Leo Carrillo), who does all he can to further his domestics' increasingly complicated career. Failing to marry his cook himself, he discovers that she is in love with the butler, who by this time has returned to his old job and is preparing to marry a young lady of fashion. A ceremony equivalent to that of fitting the glass slipper is achieved when the bridegroom finds himself kidnapped at a fashionable wedding, rushed off to the racketeer's establishment for a machine-gun marriage to the girl he really loves.

Like those earlier Columbia hits, It Happened One Night, Broadway Bill, Love Me Forever, If You Could Only Cook has a quality most easily assessed as charm, which definitely compensates for such minor shortcomings as its title, borrowed from an antique improper story and explainable only as one more evidence of the pitiful innocence of the Hays organization. Good shot: Herbert Marshall showing Jean Arthur his design for a roadster which Chrysler Corp. would do (well to examine closely.

King of Burlesque (Twentieth-Cen-tury-Fox). When Warner Baxter, a promoter of strip acts who aspires to more artistic realms, buys himself a society wife (Mona Barrie), it is a foregone conclusion that he will not profit by the bargain. What is not a foregone conclusion about King of Burlesque is the sudden meteoric pace it strikes when Mr. Baxter starts his comeback. The situation at this point is Baxter down & out, with Alice Faye, lead in his old burlesque show, seeking a way to help him without making herself known. She and Jack Oakie hire a sandwichman to impersonate a millionaire and finance Baxter's Broadway show with her money.

The next twelve minutes of film are a concentration of superb production numbers. Through the previous sequences scenarists have planted those familiar pests that haunt theatrical producers' lives: singers & dancers out of work, members of the office force who fancy their own talents in the entertainment line. In Baxter's comeback the reversal is that all the leads are played by pests, who turn out to be marvelous. The elevator man who "had an act" is Fats Waller, pianist of Hollywood's Cotton Club; Dixie Dunbar as the telephone girl performs some routines fully as compelling as the much-touted Eleanor Powell's; 12-year-old Gareth Joplin (bootblack) turns his taps loose; Nick Long Jr., the hoofer who was always bumming doughnut money, stages a ballet. Baxter winds up in Faye's ice cream embrace, and King of Burlesque becomes one of the year's best musicals. Songs: Spreadin' Rhythm Around, I'm Shooting High, Lovely Lady, Too Good To Be True, I Love To Ride the Horses on a Merry-Go-Round.

Alice Faye, a Bronx, N. Y. girl who had done well singing at church picnics and was amateur metropolitan fancy-skating champion, got an audition with Rudy Vallee when a friend played him a homemade record of her voice. Vallee put her on his radio hour, took her to Hollywood to sing one song in George White's 1934 Scandals. Lilian Harvey walked out of the picture and Alice Faye got the lead. Vallee generously tore up his contract with her, let her sign with Fox. Both he and Miss Faye denied romantic ties though Mrs. Fay Webb Vallee mentioned Alice Faye in her divorce complaints about her husband's conduct. In Hollywood Miss Faye lately employed detectives to track down an unknown, snubnosed, 115-lb., 5 ft. 5 in. blonde who has been getting introduced at nightclubs, fights and openings as Alice Faye.

The Bride Comes Home (Paramount) investigates the advisability of two people loving each other when both possess hot tempers. The man (Fred MacMurray) graduates from being bodyguard to a rich youth (Robert Young), becomes editor of a magazine for men. The girl (Claudette Colbert) learns that her father has lost his money, rejects Young's offer of marriage but asks him to get her a job on the magazine. When MacMurray is not editing the magazine by means of alternately scribbling on and crumpling quire after quire of paper, he rudely baits Miss Colbert. She balks their plan to marry when it appears that the wedding is to take place in a great hurry in MacMurray's flat, elopes with Young, is overtaken only after her father (William Collier Sr.) rights matters.

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