The New Pictures

Girls' Dormitory (Twentieth Century-Fox). Although Herbert Marshall and Ruth Chatterton are billed above her, Simone Simon is the star of this picture. Producer Darryl Zanuck designed it expressly to provide a vehicle for her U. S. debut, and Screenwriter Gene Markey and Director Irving Cummings have intelligently fitted the material to her talents. As Marie Claudel, an undergraduate in a European seminary, she loves Stephen Dominik (Herbert Marshall), the head of the school. When a romantic, unsigned letter in her handwriting, addressed "My One and Only Love . . ." is fished out of a classroom wastebasket by an invidious and sex-starved school mistress (Constance Collier), the child is suspected of an outside liaison, forced to reveal the real object of her affections. Ultimately she prevails against the gentle fellowship which has for years united Stephen to his fellow teacher (Ruth Chatterton).

Girls' Dormitory is an intelligent exanimation of a first love too robust to be dissipated in the adolescent dreaming which initiated it. Skillful craftsmanship by all concerned eliminates the pitfall lurking in most stories of young girls in love with older men, i. e., that the hero will appear a prude if he rejects the heroine's advances, a lecher if he welcomes them. Helped by U. S. lighting and No. 28 makeup, Simone Simon is more embraceable than in her last French picture to reach the U. S. (Lac aux Dames), but Girls' Dormitory, as first made, ended without her being in the arms of Marshall. After the Hollywood preview, 125 suggestion cards, distributed to the audience, were filled out with requests for a new ending. Present fadeout shows them kissing.

Simone Simon, 19, was so thoroughly in dulged by her father, a French engineer, that in Madagascar, where he is running a graphite mine, he allowed her to roam the streets with two cub panthers on a leash. Back in Paris she went to art school, followed the well-worn course into musical comedy bits. One day W. Tourjansky, free-lance director, saw her in a street cafe, addressed a soft remark to her. She slapped his face. Impressed, he tested her, cast her as Pierrette in Chanteur Inconnu opposite Opera Singer Lucien Muratore. She made Le Roi des Palaces for Adolphe Osso and La Petite Chocolatiere for Marc Allegret, both comedy roles, got her first serious casting as elflike Puck in Lac aux Dames. Arthur Willnetz, a man ager, introduced her to Sacha Guitry, who gave her a part in O Mon Bel Inconnu. Publicized as "La Sauvage Tendre," she was mobbed by a crowd at a personal appearance in Brussels, tested by Twentieth Century-Fox, signed by Zanuck. Smart, she learned English by reading fairy stories, listening to the radio, memorizing 25 words a day. Shy, she refuses to eat in the elaborate Cafe de Paris, official studio restaurant, dines in a counter lunch with the labor gangs. Says she: "I lived for years in Madagascar among temperamental people and I was the most temperamental of them all. . . . Women have a fine time in this country."

Originally cast as Cigarette in Under Two Flags, she wilted under 16-hour-a-day shifts, began to carry a clinical thermometer around in her mouth, produce it showing readings of 105DEG. She was hospitalized, replaced by Claudette Colbert. Planned for her is a revival of Seventh Heaven.

Romeo and Juliet (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the most elaborate production in the history of Theatre or Cinema* of Shakespeare's most popular play. It cost $2,000,000. It took six months to make. It was directed by George Cukor. Its cast includes Leslie Howard, Norma Shearer, John Barrymore, Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Violet Kemble Cooper.

Cinema producers have been jeered so frequently for their ignorance that when they approach something like Shakespeare they are likely to suffer from a sense of panic. To avoid any possible gaffes in this production, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's star Producer Irving Thalberg did everything except recall Shakespeare from the grave.

Two years before a camera blinked, he sent not one researcher but a whole "technical crew" to Verona--which Shakespeare probably never saw--to make photographs of 15th Century relics to help Art Director Cedric Gibbons design sets. Cinema treatment of all abstruse ubjects requires "technical advisers." Only available advisers on Shakespeare appeared to be college professors, so Producer Thalberg imported not one but a crack team: William Strunk Jr. of Cornell and John Tucker Murray of Harvard. Their function during production was to pass on costumes, props, etc. Their function later will be to act as whipping-boys in case pedants find any blunders. In the avowed effort to make the production what Shakespeare would have wanted had he possessed the facilities of cinema, it apparently occurred to no one that, could he really have gone to Hollywood to work on the script, Shakespeare would simply have thrown away Romeo and Juliet and written a new play, as was his inflexible habit with the classics of his own day. Instead, Professor Strunk and Adapter Talbot Jennings (Mutiny on the Bounty) scrupulously arranged a script without a line of dialog not written by the Bard. When Mrs. Frances Robinson-Duff, New York's most famed dramatic coach, had been flown to Hollywood to spend a week teaching Mrs. Irving Thalberg--who was also coached by Actress Constance Collier, Actor Rollo Peters and Dancer Agnes de Mille--how to say her lines, the production was ready to begin.

There are two classes of people who have no faith in the cinema. One is that small group of incompetent critics who still prefer to think that the screen is concerned exclusively with train wrecks, bathtubs and cattle rustlers on the range. The other is Hollywood. That Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Romeo and Juliet is certainly the best since the Jane Cowl-Rollo Peters version and quite probably the best ever shown amazed the second group quite as much as it will amaze those members of the first who expose themselves to a change of mind. Cinema trade journals ever since the first preview a month ago have been buzzing with congratulations, based, as were the less justifiable panegyrics that greeted Warner Brothers' A Midsummer Night's Dream last year, on the theory that Romeo and Juliet proved that the cinema had at last grown up.

To intelligent cinemaddicts, it will be no great shock to learn that the best actors currently functioning in the U. S. act the play as well as it can be acted; that the most expensive sets ever used for Romeo and Juliet are by far the most realistic and hence the most satisfactory; and that the camera--which can see Juliet as Romeo saw her and vice versa--greatly facilitates the story. As for the play itself, which is by far the best part of the production, it remains what it has always been, the best version ever written of Hollywood's favorite theme, Boy Meets Girl.

China Clipper (Warner). After frequent appearances on the screen as a mere prop, TIME makes its debut in this picture as a story-telling device. When Dave Logan (Pat O'Brien), inspired by the Lindbergh flight, has launched a mail and passenger air service in the Caribbean, a facsimile of TIME'S Transport section appears on the screen. Under it, an inadequate little story vaguely titled, "Air" relates that Dave Logan and his Trans-Ocean Airline are doing well.

The rest of China Clipper is told by more conventional methods. Logan, his chief designer (H. B. Walthall) and two young pilots (Humphrey Bogart, Ross Alexander) put Trans-Ocean through an expansion program based on that, in real life, of Pan American Airways. Logan's wife (Beverly Roberts) leaves him at the start of the picture, returns at its conclusion. If the eventual launching of the China Clipper, and the hopeful, closing incident of a transpacific passenger flight lack verisimilitude, it is not due to any stint of zooming airplane motors, interior sequences in Alameda Airport, shots of the Clipper battling a storm. It is merely because cinema producers have not yet absorbed the lesson that fact is sometimes more salable than fiction and that to present a story like the rise of Pan American Airways in fictional form is not to increase but to destroy its impact, which is that it happened. China Clipper is to the real story of Pan American much as the facsimile TIME squib is to the story which actually ran on Pan American's Juan Terry Trippe (TIME, July 31, 1933).*

*First cinema production of Romeo and Juliet was shown in October 1916, with Francis N. Bushman and Beverly Bayne. Few days later Producer William Fox released another, which contained 411 scenes, 2,500 extras, a cast headed by Harry Milliard and Theda Bara.

*To be published next week is Skyway to Asia (Longmans, Green, $2.50) in which Pan American's William Stephen Grooch tells how he established stations for the Clipper at Honolulu, Midway, Guam and Wake Islands.

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