The New Pictures

Beloved Enemy (Samuel Goldwyn) is billed as a "legend inspired by fact." The fact is the Irish rebellion of 1921. The legend, as presented by Writers John Balderston, William Meloney & Rose Franken, should certainly raise the eyebrows of students of recent Irish history. As the hero of the ''trouble," it presents a romantic young patriot named Dennis Riordan (Brian Aherne). It derives the Irish Free State's Constitution from a few words that pass between him and his English inamorata. Lady Helen Drummond (Merle Oberon).

When Helen arrives in Ireland with her father (Henry Stephenson), an emissary of the British Government, Riordan's revolutionaries are skirmishing with English troops. She meets Riordan and they fall in love before she knows who he is. When she finds out, loyalty to her father prompts her to set a trap that almost catches him. Loyalty to Riordan then prompts her to go to him and explain what she has done. English soldiers surround his house. When he escapes, Riordan has to promise his supporters not to see her again. He keeps the promise until the night in London when he is trying to decide whether to vote for or against a compromise treaty that he knows his party will regard as treachery. After he signs it, he and Helen meet once more--when Riordan, making a triumphant speech, has been shot down by his best friend who thinks he has betrayed Ireland for a pretty face.

The incidents on which Beloved Enemy are based are so exciting that it would be hard for them to inspire a really dull picture. Lacking the succinct power of The Informer, this first Hollywood effort of 31-year-old Director Henry C. Potter, who got his start in the young New York theatrical firm of Potter & Haight, will probably reach and please an even larger audience. Strenuously romantic, magnificently acted and produced, it contains numerous moments of honest cinematic intensity: Riordan and his best friend (Jerome Cowan) escaping from English soldiers across the Dublin roofs; the wife (Karen Morley) of one of Riordan's lieutenants getting the news she has been waiting for, that English soldiers have killed her husband.

Gold Diggers of 1937 (Warners) is a type of cinemusical which nobody makes so well as the Warners. It lies half way between the song-trimmed anecdotes of the Astaire cycle and the compendiums of specialty acts that are the current fashion (see p. 22). There are always plenty of plot and plenty of dancing girls with curves in the right places. There is not too much gold-digging and, above all. the established ways of creating audience sympathy for leading characters are disregarded. Heroes and heroines of the Warner cycle demand your love by being either nincompoops or rascals.

Norma (Joan Blondell), a girl who cannot dance or sing, falls in love with Rosmer (Dick Powell), an insurance salesman who cannot sell insurance. Some of the stranded show girls in her troupe would put their foot against a train door and then keep on yanking at the doorknob till they got a man to help them. Norma, more modest, does better, lands a job as Rosmer's secretary. In Manhattan, one J. J. Hobart (Victor Moore), a hypochondriac theatrical tycoon, is being diddled by a pair of lawyers (Osgood Perkins and Charles Brown). Having lost the money he gave them to invest in a musical, they insure his life for a million dollars. Thus is created the master situation of the picture--a contest between Powell, as salesman of the policy, to keep Hobart alive, and his defrauders' determination to kill him off. To any person of the slightest moral stamina, it ought not to be laughable to see two low fellows trying to drown a middle-aged man, supposedly sick, in a swimming pool. Yet this scene is very funny. So are the results when the villains, now desperate, hire Genevieve (Glenda Farrell) to excite J. J.'s passion, hoping the rise in blood pressure will kill him. But Genevieve falls in love with J. J., divulges the plot and J. J., seriously ill, backs the show with Norma, still unable to sing or dance, playing the lead.

Best moments: Norma meeting Rosmer while he is shaving in a train compartment; the insurance company marching to the train, singing the Life Insurance Song. Best of the Harburg and Arlen numbers: Speaking of the Weather, Let's Put Our Heads Together.

After the Thin Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) avoids the pitfall of most sequels, that of seeming a weak copy of the original, by being so much like its original that only experts in Dashiell Hammett plots will be able to tell the difference. In this picture, Asta. Detective Nick Charles's wire-haired terrier, has a mate, and the scene of operations is San Francisco instead of New York. In other respects, Mr. & Mrs. Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) maintain unchanged the amiably frantic domesticity which, in The Thin Man, set the style for detective cinema in 1934.

Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who had recourse to narcotics, Detective Nick Charles depends solely upon alcohol. In After the Thin Man, he sets a new record for deductive drinking. Fortified by a few nips aboard the train, he and his wife arrive in San Francisco to find a party already in progress at their house. After a few nips more, they go to a family dinner, where Nick drinks the other male guests into a stupor. When it turns out that the scapegrace husband of Mrs. Charles's pretty cousin (Elissa Landi) has mysteriously disappeared, Nick Charles finds him in a cabaret but he has barely time to drink his health before the scapegrace staggers out to be murdered. Detective Charles then settles down to drink and work in earnest. His evening reaches its peak when, in a room containing half a dozen dangerous characters and a police aide (Sam Levene), the lights suddenly go off and shooting starts. Insuperably nonchalant Detective Charles utilizes this moment for a quick drink.

Before Detective Charles has pinned responsibility for the murder to the least likely character involved, After the Thin Man has introduced to cinema audiences as amusing a group of suspects as Author Hammett, its No. 1 purveyor of this specialty, has yet contributed to the screen. Included are: a monosyllabic cabaret keeper (Joseph Calleia) who shoots at Detective Charles in an apartment house basement; Mrs. Charles's Aunt Katherine (Jessie Ralph), who breaks photographers' cameras with an umbrella as big as a pole-vault pole; mild young David Graham (James Stewart), in love with Mrs. Charles's cousin; a Chinese restaurateur (William Law) who looks like an owl, and a dancing girl (Dorothy McNulty), one of whose relatives is one of the total of three corpses discovered in the course of the entertainment. Good shot: Asta, inspecting his mate's litter of puppies, amazed to find a black one that looks like the Scotty next door.

College Holiday (Paramount) is one of those enormous, uninspired amalgamations of specialty numbers which Paramount issues periodically in the hope that sheer quantity will assure every cinemaddict of finding at least one item to his special taste. Strung out along a flimsy plot--about an eccentric dowager's scheme of turning her hotel into the scene of a eugenics experiment, and the hotel manager's counterscheme of supplying, as material for the experiment, young people capable of putting on entertainments that will attract paying guests--are a series of acts which show what has become of old-fashioned vaudeville. Samples: Gracie Allen. George Burns and Ben Blue dancing the minuet; Martha Raye stretching her monstrous mouth; Jack Benny in a burlesque version of Love in Bloom; Marsha Hunt and Leif Erikson singing to each other.

Songs: The Sweetheart Waltz, I Adore Yon, So What? Rhyme for Love.

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