The New Pictures

The Devil-Doll (Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer) is the most ambitious effort ever undertaken in the use of the long-known but seldom-employed technique of photographic disproportion. Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) gets back to Paris from an undeserved sojourn on Devil's Island with a handy means of vengeance on the men who put him there. His weapon is a discovery made by a fellow prisoner (Henry B. Walthall) of a way to reduce people to one-sixth of their size. Heretofore the process, which has been used only for such playful purposes as reducing St. Bernard dogs to the size of Chow pups, has had the effect on humans of reducing their minds commensurately with their bodies, making the resultant peewees almost witless. The scientist eliminates this flaw in his discovery, and Lavond, masquerading as a dear old lady,* makes big ones into little ones in the basement of a Paris doll shop, reduces his principal enemy to a 12-in. apache doll, sends him out to stick a poisoned dagger in another man he dislikes. Sentenced to die, the remaining villain confesses that the charges that sent Lavond to prison were trumped up, clearing his name so that Lavond's daughter Lorraine (Maureen O'Sullivan) can be happy with her sweetheart Tota (Frank Lawton).

Some of the doll-men scenes were made by re-projecting double-exposed images upon a measured screen, but most of them required the vastly simpler although staggeringly expensive method of literal photography in sets six times normal size. These scenes were shot on MGM's famed Stage No. 12, twice as big as any other soundstage on the lot. Unlike Director Tod Browning's Freaks, or most of the famed Lon Chaney silents which he made, The Devil-Doll's hobgoblinery beguiles rather than frightens.

The Bride Walks Out (RKO) exhibits the difficulties, economic and temperamental, encountered by a devoted young couple who try to keep house on $35 a week. The bride (Barbara Stanwyck), in order to indulge her taste for $50 negligees, takes a job as a model. The husband (Gene Raymond) suffers from hurt pride. An alcoholic stranger (Robert Young) takes a hand in the proceedings at this point, almost breaks up the menage before the young pair's best friends (Ned Sparks and Helen Broderick) patch it up.

The moving picture business--whether because producers feel that the season will excuse shortcomings or diminish protests --has long manufactured a staple product known as "summer fare." The Bride Walks Out is a fair sample of it, one of the minor discomforts of hot weather, to be classed with mosquitoes and warm mayonnaise. Typical gag (by Sparks): "Maybe if I get fired, Millie will divorce me. There I go, daydreaming again."

Public Enemy's Wife (Warner) is another salty little treatise on the G-man, whose habits, indoors and out, are of such moment to Warner Brothers. Here the G-man (Pat O'Brien) and his partner (Robert Armstrong) are to be seen engaged in a man hunt for Gangster Gene Maroc (Cesar Romero) whom they expect to find loitering jealously near his ex-wife (Margaret Lindsay). The crisis of the picture arrives during a wedding ceremony which, planned as a trap for Gangster Maroc, fails when Maroc, instead of shooting the bridegroom, merely snickers at him from the organ loft.

Public Enemy's Wife can be rated as mildly worthwhile only because Margaret Lindsay's acidulous portrayal of an ex-gun-moll turned Palm Beach socialite makes such a character seem faintly plausible. Typical shot: Maroc and another gangster engaged in a furious gunplay while their automobiles careen wildly up & down a chain of mountains supposedly situated somewhere on the coast of Florida.

White Fang (Twentieth Century-Fox) is designed as a further test of U. S. box-office enthusiasm for dogs. Lightning, black-mottled German shepherd, has huge incisor molars which for story purposes are coupled with his sullen-surly, single-track loyalty to Weedon Scott (Michael Whalen), his only friend in Alaska.

Lightning saved Scott's life when, finding him unconscious in the snow, he howled until help came. He saves it again when Beauty Smith (John Carradine) tries to arrange Scott's lynching for an alleged murder and mine-jumping. As owner of the mine, Jean Muir is so sensationally virginal she makes the Alaskan backgrounds seem subtropical by comparison. Good shot: The fight between Lightning and a Pit Bull.

*Said Barrymore when he saw himself in the role: "My God! It's Ethel."

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