The New Pictures

Exclusive Story (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is based, according to advertisements, on revelations made to its producers by Hearstling Martin Mooney, whose jailing for refusing to reveal to a grand jury the sources of his news stories about New York's numbers game, roughly coincided with Exclusive Story's premiere in Manhattan last week. The revelations range from the not particularly astounding information that racketeers browbeat small shopkeepers and sometimes shoot each other, to the more alarming but less plausible hypothesis that the Mono Castle (called in the picture the Mochado} was ignited by a shipload of liquid fire owned by a Manhattan crime cabal.

Exclusive in only the most metaphorical sense, the story also concerns itself with the efforts of a star reporter (Stuart Erwin) to track down the racketeers; the professional vagaries of a tippling public prosecutor (Franchot Tone), and his shilly-shallying with two young ladies (Madge Evans, Louise Henry); the vocational difficulties of the neurotic triggerman (Joseph Calleia) for the numbers racketeers. Best scene in the picture and most gruesome* in the month's crop of such exhibits shows the public prosecutor torturing the triggerman into a wholesale confession of his crimes by beating him, strapping him into a chair, leaving him alone with a sinister package supposed to contain a timebomb.

Ceiling Zero (Warner), a crisp adaptation of last year's successful stage play, is not apt to whet the average citizen's appetite for flying, despite the moral that pilots are brave men willing to die for Science.

Jake Lee (Pat O'Brien) is the hard-shelled, soft-hearted ground superintendent of the Federal Air Lines of Newark, N. J. A onetime pilot named Dizzy Davis (James Cagney) returns to the field to get his old job back. An irresponsible limb to whom blondes & brunettes mean the same thing, his escapades are matched only by the superintendent's reckless loyalty to him. Immediately Dizzy Davis sniffs suggestively at a luscious 19 -year-old aviatrix. To keep an engagement with her, he feigns a heart attack, has a pal (Stuart Erwin) pilot his run. In accordance with best make-believe traditions the pal strikes fog, and, with radio out of commission, bashes through high tension wires, squashes a hangar, dies. After considerable high jinks, Davis braves a storm to test a de-icer invention crashes to his death a slightly tarnished Hero.

Strike Me Pink (Samuel Goldwyn). In the process of establishing himself as a Hollywood reincarnation of Florenz Ziegfeld, Producer Sam Goldwyn, who says he does not care how much a picture costs so long as it pleases Mrs. Goldwyn, expended more than usual pains on Strike Me Pink. He had the script, made from a Saturday Evening Post story by Clarence Budington Kelland, worked over by 14 writers in teams of two. He cut out a $100,000 dance sequence because it made the picture too long. He added a $75,000 episode to the plot because it made it more exciting. Despite all these novel precautions, Strike Me Pink, if it really pleased Mrs. Sam Goldwyn, did so because her taste in cinema comedies has not changed since the early days of Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett.

Through the first two-thirds of the picture, Eddie Cantor, as Eddie Pink, a timid amusement-park manager embroiled with slot-machine racketeers, gives a fair imitation of Chaplin's famed characterization of a peewee battling gaily against overwhelming destiny. The last third of the picture is a chase in the classic Keystone tradition, starting when the racketeers, dressed in policemen's uniforms, pursue Eddie Pink around a roller coaster, and ending when Eddie and his Greek bodyguard (Parkya-karkus) find themselves trapped in a captive balloon. Eddie escapes by falling into an acrobats' net.

What makes Strike Me Pink slightly superior to its more recent predecessors in the series of pictures made by Cantor and Goldwyn is not so much the elaborate production numbers, in which the Goldwyn Girls function as decoratively as usual, but the activities of an animated young woman named Ethel Merman. Long familiar to Manhattan stage audiences, Ethel Merman's previous cinema appearances have been trifling and unimpressive. In Strike Me Pink, cast as a cabaret entertainer who nearly demolishes Eddie Pink's romance with a wholesome blonde (Sally Eilers), she comes into her own, sings all three of the show's best songs: First You Have Me High, Then You Have Me Low!, Shake It Off With Rhythm, Calabash Pipe.

*The theory that the most noteworthy trend of the cinema in 1935 was towards scenes of 'physical torture and brutality," and that the trend "may be related very distinctly to the national state of mind" was suggested last fortnight by Andre Sennwald, brilliant 28-year-old cinema critic of the New York Times, in an article called ''Gory, Gory Hallelujah." Same day the article appeared, the mangled corpse of Critic Sennwald was discovered in the living room of his penthouse. An explosion was caused by a spark in a gas-filled room in which he had apparently committed suicide.

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