The New Pictures

It's Love Again (Gaumont British). As a vehicle for the dancing and singing of big-eyed Jessie Matthews, this musi-comedy sometimes staggers along in low gear, sometimes spins at a sparkling clip. Mass Matthews is visible and audible almost all the time in a number of elaborate sets and a variety of costumes, some of which reveal nearly all of her personable person. As Gaumont British has found no

Fred Astaire for her, she does all her dances alone, except for one rumba with Cyril Wells. Pleasant, unobtrusive songs by Sam Coslow and Harry Woods include It's Love Again and I've Got to Dance My Way to Heaven. The story, an absurd fable, concerns a society-gossip columnist {Sonnie Hale, Miss Matthews' husband in real life) who has trouble finding a celebrity to write about. A friend (Robert Young) invents one, a glamorous Mrs. Smythe-Smythe, proficient dancer and tiger-shooter just back from India. Miss Matthews, having failed to impress a sleepy producer, poses as Mrs. Smythe-Smythe, startles London by riding down the Mall on a camel. Funniest sequence: Mrs. Smythe-Smythe is asked to demonstrate her shoot ing prowess at an Oriental party given in her honor; the gun, going off in her shaking hands, shatters a vase, knocks the cap off a musician's head, breaks a globe in the chandelier; a colonel of the Sixth Lancers, full of cocktails, duplicates these feats, shoots down the chandelier to boot. Three Wise Guys (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is another one from the private dream world of Damon Runyon. A hard-boiled restatement of the Nativity story, it presents a trio of crooks whose female front (Betty Furness) falls in love with a rich man's son (Robert Young) whom they intend to swindle. When the young couple marry they are disinherited, undergo progressive misfortunes until they end up in a Pennsylvania barn. The crooks pull a robbery for which Young goes to jail. Not until the end of the film does the dreamy Runyon touch appear. On Christmas Eve in a manger near Bethlehem, Pa., the amiable criminal, who happens to be an ex-doctor (Raymond Walburn), delivers the young wife of a baby while the hard-boiled member of the gang (Bruce Cabot) meltingly gives up the stolen bonds to get her husband out of prison.

Typical of the rambling whimsicality of this better-than-average program picture is the sequence in which Robert Young obtains the promise of a job, gets his finger caught in the nozzle of an apartment house fire hose, vainly tries to extricate it before his new employer finds out what a fool he is.

The King Steps Out (Columbia) is a Central European romp in which Soprano Grace Moore sings six songs from an old Fritz Kreisler operetta called Cissy. One of the songs, Madly in Love, became more celebrated than it deserved when Miss Moore, who sang it in peasant garb while milking a cow, flounced off the Columbia lot vowing never to return. Said she: "I don't mind milking a cow or two in the course of a day, but also to sing all day is something else again. I have another public besides that one out in Hollywood."

Neither of Miss Moore's publics will find The King Steps Out very remarkable. In it a young king (Franchot Tone) falls in love with a peasant (Miss Moore) who turns out to be the sister of the princess (Frieda Inescort) to whom he is reluctantly betrothed. Much of the subsequent straightening out is done by an old king (Walter Connolly) who loves to drink beer and chop wood with his subjects.

Good shot: Connolly in full-dress uniform blowing the feathers from his cocked hat out of his mouth. Dancing Pirate (Pioneer). For weeks Pioneer Studios pestered writers, directors and newspapermen with one-line epistles such as "A black & white picture is like a julep without green mint,""Imagine Christmas with black holly and grey ribbon." A more cogent item in this campaign to educate the industry away from monotone is Dancing Pirate itself, which emerges as a lively and colorful nine-reeler.

In 1820 Jonathan Pride (Charles Collins), Boston dancing master, is captured by pirates after he has been shanghaied around the Horn. When the pirates go ashore for fresh water near one of those exotic hamlets favored traditionally by thirsty brigands, he is taken prisoner by the town's alcalde (Frank Morgan) and avoids execution only by dancing on the gallows platform to prove that his trade is terpsichorean rather than homicidal. Saved from death, he promptly commits the locally unpardonable crime of putting his arm around Serafina (Steffi Duna). Workmen are rebuilding the gallows when Serafina listens to his explanations, gets him out of jail, waltzes with him in the public square at midnight to the strains of a music box.

Dancing Pirate's color is still bright and raw but far better suited to songs and dances than the less showmanly shades of nature. Color Director Robert Edmond Jones has made a flat sunlight like sauterne and romantic blue moonlight in which the company in blue costumes does the When You're Dancing the Waltz number. Gabriel Cansino of the "Royal Can-sinos," for three generations command performers of the dance to Spanish royalty, does his famed cape dance with a scarlet & grey cape among yellow & scarlet costumes.

Best of the Rodgers & Hart songs: Are You My Love?

Bullets or Ballots (Warner). This picture is bound to be exploited as an inside revelation because it is based on a story by Martin Mooney, whose Crime, Incorporated was released at the time that Hearstling went to jail in Manhattan rather than reveal his news sources to a grand jury (TIME, Jan. 20). Whether Bullets or Ballots will be accepted as authentic will depend upon whether cinemaddicts believe in its thesis, seriously emphasized, that the highest-ups in a racket syndicate which extorts millions of dollars from the U. S. are three suave bankers whose respectability is indicated by their impeccable evening dress.

Not to be quarreled with are sequences in Bullets or Ballots which show that racketeers make money in milk, vegetables, pin games, numbers, that honest policemen know who they are. What makes it a good picture, despite its solemn interest in the obvious, is that it brings Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) back into the crime fold, this time on the side of the Law. A plain-clothes man exiled to The Bronx, Robinson goes into action when a reform movement attempts to break racketeering from the bottom up. No wise cinemagoer will be fooled when Robinson publicly hits the New York Police Commissioner on the jaw, when he throws in his lot with a ''good" racketeer, or when a "bad" racketeer (Humphrey Bogart) views him with meditative eyes. During the course of the racket's breakup, the chief cause for excitement is not how the three well-dressed bankers will be caught but when Robinson will get shot.

The Princess Comes Across (Para-mount). One way to ameliorate a Marion Davies picture used to be to allow her to exercise her passable talent for impersonating other actresses. The Princess Comes Across invades this neglected field by allowing Carole Lombard to perform a fine imitation of the accent, mannerisms and to some extent the appearance of Greta Garbo.

As an unsuccessful Brooklyn chorus girl, she teams up with an elderly actress (Alison Skipworthj to impersonate a Swedish Princess Olga and her lady in waiting, gets a Hollywood contract. On a transatlantic liner they meet a concertina-playing orchestra leader (Fred MacMurray) who becomes invaluable to them when the ship is the scene of a decidedly confusing murder mystery.

Miss Lombard lends authority to her many "Ay tank's" but not to what is supposed to be her first big surprise line: "I'd like to give that guy a sock on the kisser." Good bit: Miss Skipworth inveighing against the concertina ("Put it on the floor and it crawls").

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.