The New Pictures

The Poor Little Rich Girl (Twentieth Century-Fox). Shirley Temple pictures, emerging with the regularity of the seasons, have one point in common. All are minutely tailored to suit her requirements. In this procedure, the weak point is that Shirley Temple's requirements have now outgrown the ingenuity of her purveyors. Her current summer issue, in doing justice to the Temple torch song and tap dance, neglects the Temple talent for emotional acting.

A thoroughly modernized version of the Mary Pickford classic of 1916, The Poor Little Rich Girl depicts its peewee heiress-heroine wandering away from her father's mansion, following an organ grinder to his basement flat, making friends with the vaudeville actors who live upstairs, joining their act which turns out to be a smash hit on the radio hour of the crotchety soap manufacturer who is her father's business rival. Shirley is absent from the screen in only six sequences, foots neatly through three dance numbers, sings You've Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby and But Definitely, which she pronounces incorrectly. Best shot: the Temple sneeze.

Bunker Bean (RKO). Admirers of Harry Leon Wilson's famed Merton of the Movies will find in Wilson's Bunker Bean another introvert so thoroughly frustrated that his past neglect by picturemakers seems inexplicable. Bean (Owen Davis Jr.) is a male secretary who spends evenings typing, gratis, a fellow-roomer's treatise on reincarnation. Gathering from this work that a man's success depends on knowing what he was in past incarnations, Bean consults a seeress who tells him he was Napoleon Bonaparte. To live up to his astral personality, Bean buys a loud checked costume recommended in a magazine suspiciously resembling Esquire and defined as an "English shooting suit." He spends a weekend at the house of his boss (Robert McWade), swigs his liquor, spanks his daughter Mary (Louise Latimer).

When his behavior has unfavorable reactions, he goes back to the seeress, who creates a new past for him as Ram-Tah, Egyptian king. Possession of his ancestor's shriveled mummy further restores Bean's confidence. Marriage to Mary and the sale of an airplane patent, following the destruction of the mummy, then convince Bean that his deeds are his own instead of Ram-Tah's.

Possibly because of its unimportant cast and modest aspirations, Bunker Bean is practically perfect hot-weather entertainment.

San Francisco (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) offers cinemaddicts views of two unusual phenomena: the San Francisco earthquake (April 18, 1906) and Jeanette MacDonald acting with her teeth. Of the two, the latter is the more appalling. The earthquake, however, has more noteworthy sound effects. In addition to glimpses of tables falling, walls caving, bricks pouring, houses toppling, streets gaping and a city burning, it includes enough squeaking, howling, booming and crashing to shake the rafters of the sturdiest cinemansion. An earthquake in the real Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer manner, it lasts for 20 minutes on the screen and in all respects except casualties no doubt betters its original of 30 years ago.

The reason for the San Francisco earthquake, as all cinemaddicts have long been well aware, was not a geological fault but rather certain unfortunate conditions in the city's night life. Before the Legion of Decency started, there was generally supposed to be white slavery, opium and hatchet-work in Chinatown. San Francisco, bringing the earthquake up to date, makes it plain that its real cause lay in the fact that Clark Gable did not say his prayers at night. Gable is Blackie Norton, owner of a notorious cafe, and Miss MacDonald is his No. 1 chanteuse. Father Tim (Spencer Tracy) struggles to make a convert out of Blackie while Mr. Burley (Jack Holt) struggles to make an opera singer out of the chanteuse, so that she will be worthy of his manor on Nob Hill. The Burley plan is succeeding much better than Father Tim's when the bricks begin to rain.

When the earthquake sound effects are over, the MacDonald sound effects begin again. Having rendered two night club ditties, "San Francisco," a mission anthem and part of the role of Marguerite in Faust, she is yodeling Nearer, My God, To Thee in a tent settlement when Blackie rediscovers her, kneels down to talk to God. A shrewd compendium of romance and catastrophe, with emphasis on the latter, skilfully administered by Director Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke, San Francisco is an excellent example of Hollywood's ability to make yesterday's headlines as exciting as today's. Good shot: The bent figure on a pediment pitching slowly forward.

Parole (Universal) is a brisk treatise, in the great cinema tradition of cops & robbers, on the evils of the parole system. A law student (Henry Hunter), released after a two-year term for an automobile accident, falls foul of the parole board. A hardened young criminal (Alan Baxter), who knows the ropes, has no difficulties whatever. It takes a series of murders, a scandalous expose of the methods of a rich building contractor (Alan Dinehart), quick work on the part of the parolee's onetime cellmate (Grant Mitchell) to produce reforms.

Adapted by Kubec Glasmon (Public Enemy), Horace McCoy and the New York Herald Tribune's onetime crack crime reporter, Joel Sayre, Parole is unlikely to affect the U. S. penal system but it should not disappoint cinemaddicts who like rapid-fire entertainment. Typical shot: Noah Beery Jr., no gorilla-faced "heavy" like his father but a boy-scout type juvenile, receiving a bullet in the back.

The White Angel (Warner) is Florence Nightingale (Kay Francis) paddling about London in a state of sombre indignation because she has nothing better to do than play the piano. One evening morose Flo stays home from a party, reads the reports of her father's committee on the conditions of nurses in London's hospitals. The conditions are appalling and Flo's life work is cut out for her. She goes to a German nursing school, returns to England at the outbreak of the Crimean War (1854), wangles permission from the War Office to take a band of nurses to Scutari, there staff the British base hospital.

At Scutari, Flo and her charges sweep the dirty corridors, poison the rats, reduce the death rate from 42% to 2%. Ably publicized by the London Times correspondent (Ian Hunter), their efforts infuriate the chief physician (Donald Crisp) who considers female nursing a sin & a shame. Flo goes to the front hospital at Balaklava, catches cholera, gets back to Scutari to find most of her good work undone. She does it over again, returns to London, gets from Queen Victoria a brooch and the recognition which has been her aim: that women are worthy to be wartime nurses and that nursing is a profession fit for worthy women. Since an average feature picture costs $300,000 to make, very few Hollywood producers care to experiment. A few departures from banal routine have established Warner Brothers, in their own eyes at least, as bold pathfinders in the realm of entertainment. Last autumn, with The Story of Louis Pasteur, Warner Brothers made the astonishing discovery that straightforward biography, long a well-rewarded branch of literature and the theatre, was equally adaptable to the cinema. The White Angel, another apple from the same branch, is not only a worthy but often a fascinating study of the past, reviving handsomely the glory of bygone days and deeds. A similar entertainment presented on the stage would attract encomiums not only from critics but also from teachers, doctors and philanthropists. On the screen it will fail to do so only be cause fashion deems it unsophisticated to credit Hollywood with sincerity.

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