The New Pictures

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (Paramount). In the first full-length Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp (TIME, May 27), the method of Color Director Robert Edmond Jones was to compose the chromatic values of each sequence as if it were a museum piece rather than an episode in a story. In The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the first Technicolor feature made outdoors, Producer Walter Wanger and Director Henry Hathaway treat the medium with no such self-conscious awe. Sets, costumes and backgrounds are reproduced as far as possible in their natural hues. No effort is made to hypnotize the audience into the mood of the story by means of the Kalmus three-sided prism process. Except for a few superfluous shots of mist over the mountains, lakes reflecting the clouds at twilight and scrub pines shivering symbolically against the skyline, the cutting is handled much as it might have been if the picture had been made in black & white. As a result, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine can be viewed not merely as a milestone in the history of color in cinema but also as satisfactory entertainment.

It might have been even more satisfactory entertainment if Producer Wanger had selected, for the embodiment of his sane notions about color production, some vehicle more appropriate to the latest wrinkle in Hollywood ingenuity than John Fox Jr.'s antiquated sermon about Kentucky hillbillies and their childish squabbles. Used as cinema by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915 and again in 1922, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was never a dramatic masterpiece and it has not improved with age. In this version, Fred MacMurray is the brash young engineer who, when he goes to the hills to mine coal, finds him self first obliged to patch up the enmities between the Falins and the Tollivers, who have been killing each other on sight for so many years that no one remembers how the trouble started. Sylvia Sidney is the pert mountain lass who turns hellcat when the Falins kill her baby brother. Henry Fonda is her cousin, whose conveniently heroic death neatly terminates both the feud and the last difficulty in the romance between MacMurray and Miss Sidney. Most frequent shot: Fonda taking down his squirrel rifle to "go huntin'."

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was made on location in the San Bernardino Range, 90 miles from Los Angeles. Difficulties inherent in all location work were augmented by the fact that Technicolor cameras weigh 200 lb., three times as much as ordinary ones; that closeups had to be made before 3 p. m. because after that fading light made the actors' faces yellow, while longer range shots had to be made later in the afternoon; that shooting was frequently interrupted because cold turned the actors' noses red; that deviations as slight as the flush on an actor's face caused by eating a heavy lunch were ludicrously apparent on color film. The cast, which includes Fred Stone, Beulah Bondi, Fuzzy Knight and 6-year-old Spanky McFarland, used almost no makeup, built bonfires to keep themselves warmed to the right shade between shots.

Distrustful of all change, Hollywood was not sufficiently impressed by Becky Sharp to do more than wait watchfully for the plunge into color which the industry admits is eventually inevitable. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine may be the starting gun. Producers Sam Goldwyn, David Selznick, Alexander Korda, Darryl Zanuck and Walter Wanger, who last week transferred his producing company from Paramount to United Artists, all have one color production on their current schedules; Pioneer Pictures, Inc. has four. Last week when The Trail of the Lonesome Pine broke records for an opening night at Manhattan's Paramount Theatre. Technicolor stock wriggled up to 26.

Every Saturday Night (Twentieth Century-Fox) bathes its audience in an atmosphere of homey sweetness which should make the picture a success at any neighborhood playhouse. Mr. Evers (Jed Prouty) is the father of a "typical American family." He has a spry old mother (Florence Roberts) whose two loves are slang and coffee, a complacent wife (Spring Byington), five children who exemplify all the traditionally wholesome traits of youth. Bonnie (June Lang) is the 18-year-old apple of her father's eye except that she goes around with Clark Newall (Thomas Beck), spoiled son of the idle rich. Jack at 17 is absorbed in his first dinner jacket. Roger at 12 is a sharp little banker charging his brothers usury. Lucy at 10 yearns to be another Katharine Hepburn. Bobby at 5 toddles around gurgling "Okey-doke."

Out of this handful of types comes a quietly amusing little morality play, built on such domestic difficulties as Jack's disobeying his father, Bobby's cutting his wrist, Bonnie's almost getting smashed in an automobile wreck. During the picture's two-day action the family's love and unity seem on the verge of extinction in a dozen petty antagonisms which finally vanish when a real crisis arises.

When Producer Darryl Zanuck previewed Every Saturday Night, he was so delighted he decided to make three more pictures along the same line, using the same cast, same scene. Billed as "Our American Family" series, the four pictures will be the first example in the talkies of an idea Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew used long and successfully in silent days.

The Music Goes 'Round (Columbia) had been completed under its original title, Rolling Along, when the insane little song called The Music Goes 'Round and Around, popularized by two Manhattan night club entertainers, became an overnight sensation (TIME, Jan. 20). Quick to take the bait, Columbia rechristened the picture, signed contracts with the entertainers Eddy Farley and Mike Riley, who were then generally supposed to be the song's composers,* flew them and four members of their troupe to Hollywood, built the picture to a climax in which they sing their song. The result was hustled into U. S. cinemansions last week.

Unfortunately, by last week The Music Goes 'Round and Around had definitely ceased to be a hit. For four weeks it has failed to appear on Variety's list of the 25 tunes most played on the air. Sheet sales have dropped 95% since their peak in early January. To most radio addicts, overfamiliarity has made the song something in the nature of an auditory emetic. Consequently, the impressive sequence in which Farley & Riley, then a German comedian, then an operatic tenor, then the star of the picture and finally the whole audience in a theatre sing the song can scarcely be classed as a happy inspiration.

In other respects The Music Goes 'Round has little novelty to recommend it beyond the presence in the cast of Harry Richman, whose Times Square baritone and face of a dissolute mastiff have not been on display for cinemaddicts since Putting on the Ritz in 1930. He is a song & dance man who salvages a troupe of cheap melodrama actors from a Mississippi River showboat, puts them in his Broadway production, gets remorse when the audience laughs at the heroine (Rochelle Hudson).

Follow the Fleet (RKO) was designed to take lean, prissy-looking Fred Astaire out of the gilded surroundings in which he has crooned and capered hitherto and put him before his enraptured public as a man among men. He wears a sailor suit with as much flare as he ever brought to a top hat & tails. He sings in his reedy voice three new Irving Berlin songs and he dances four times: 1) an eccentric fox-trot with knee-flips in a dancehall, where he and Ginger Rogers win the contest; 2) a parody deck drill on a battleship with a sailor chorus; 3) another foxtrot, with Miss Rogers in a crosstime routine; 4) a final ballroom number with her. For those who are tired of the hoofing of this Hollywood team, it is all just more of the same.

Complications developed from the old Belasco play Shore Leave are of the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl formula. The wind-up is a benefit show on board a freighter: boys-get-girls.

Ginger Rogers no longer fakes. Working ten hours a day for two years, she has taught herself to dance, with Astaire's help, until she has become a full-fledged teammate. Irving Berlin, now apparently a third but highly helpful wheel in the Rogers-Astaire tandem, wrote music and lyrics of all seven tunes used in Follow the Fleet. The more serious numbers, Here Am I, But Where Are You, Get Thee Behind Me, Satan, have a nostalgic catch that is characteristically Berlinish. They are sung by Harriet Hilliard whose general proficiency got her a starring contract when RKO officials saw Follow the Fleet previewed.

*In Chicago last week William Harold ("Red") Hodgson, who claims to be the original composer of The Music Goes 'Round and Around and who two months ago agreed to give Messrs. Farley & Riley two-thirds of the profits on his composition in recognition of their exploitation of it, thought better of his generosity, started a suit for plagiarism, asked for an injunction to prevent Columbia from showing The Music Goes 'Round.

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