The New Pictures

Champagne Waltz (Paramount). The perennial and expensive effort to make a Grace Moore out of Gladys Swarthout seemed to have more logic some time ago when Miss Moore was a more important box-office draw. This version of the endeavor is a heavy-footed musical naively designed to combine the best features of jazz with those of the Viennese waltz. It concerns one Buzzy Bellew (Fred MacMurray), leader of a swing band which, reaching Vienna in a continental tour, ruins the business of the Franz & Elsa Strauss Waltz Palace. In the U. S. consulate, Elsa (Gladys Swarthout), who has gone there to complain about her rival's tactics, meets Buzzy, mistakes him for the consul. Their romance begins when, he inducts her into the technique of chewing gum; nearly smashes when, in the picture's funniest sequence, she telephones the real consul to tell him she has swallowed her gum--a call which is intercepted, with much double entendre, by the consul's wife. After learning Buzzy's real identity, Elsa parts from him only to be reunited after many vicissitudes when he is a rundown member of a dilapidated supper band and she, in a new Waltz Palace, is the rage of Manhattan.

With an appealing tremble of her lower jaw, Miss Swarthout, smartly dressed, sings several songs. None of them is notable. Whatever merits Champagne Waltz possesses are dependent on the well-seasoned comic abilities of Jack Oakie, cast as Happy Gallagher, manager of the band. Badly befuddled by the ways of Europeans, Gallagher wanders through elaborate settings making remarks like "60 feet away you can't tell them apart and 60 days later you don't care. . . . All women drive you screwy except your mother and she drove your old man screwy." Best musical number: dream sequence of Johann Strauss playing his Blue Danube for the Emperor. Worst comedy sequence: members of Bellew's Band wriggling around in a trained seal act in which they shockingly resemble a familiar type of paralytic.

This week Champagne Waltz starts simultaneous showings in 80 theatres in 24 countries all over the globe. The wholesale premiere of the picture, which Paramount's Board Chairman Adolph Zukor picked as the most festive of Paramount's present crop, was only one of a series of ceremonies arranged to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his start in the cinema industry. The Zukor Silver Jubilee, which began Jan. 7 and will last, according to Paramount publicity, for 17 weeks, reached its peak two weeks before the Champagne Waltz premiere. At a Hollywood super-dinner to Producer Zukor, Cinema Tsar Will Hays called Producer Zukor "a splendid American', a great leader," Leopold Stokowski conducted a 150-piece orchestra, Paramount's contract players joined in a floor show which, on a basis of combined salaries involved, was doubtless the most expensive ever staged.

Adolph Zukor arrived in the U. S. in 1889, got into the cinema industry after being a furrier, then a nickelodeon operator. In 1912 he formed Famous Players Film Co., which eventually became Paramount Pictures Inc. Last fortnight's festivities marked Chairman Zukor's return to power in his own company from which he was practically ousted in 1931 by John Hertz and Albert Lasker. During the Hertz-Lasker regime and the John Otterson regime that followed it, Adolph Zukor had small authority. Last summer, Paramount's board of directors decided to restore the man under whom the company had its greatest prosperity from 1921 to 1930.

As Paramount's board chairman, with his friend, Barney Balaban, Chicago theatreman, for president, Adolph Zukor is currently in sole charge of Paramount production. His first move has been to restore executives ousted during the Otterson regime, fill Hollywood tradepapers with glowing testimonials to his own faith in Paramount's forthcoming product. During Adolph Zukor's previous absolute reign at Paramount, production was largely handled by able colleagues like Jesse L. Lasky and Ben P. Schulberg. Despite his 25 years in the industry, Producer Zukor is by no means a veteran at his present job. Last week, Hollywood and Wall Street were waiting to see if, when all the celebration was over, he would really have hoisted the quality of Paramount product.

The Eternal Mask (Progress Films) is the inside story of a nervous breakdown. In it, outlined with scope, clarity and impact attainable in no medium except the cinema, the psychiatric case history of a young Swiss physician becomes one of the season's most exciting melodramas.

Dr. Dumartin (Mathias Wieman) has perfected a new serum for meningitis. Before he has time to try it on himself, there is an epidemic in the Basle hospital where he works under Professor Tscherko (Peter Petersen). Dumartin begs for a chance to try the serum on a case diagnosed as hopeless; Tscherko refuses; Dumartin disobeys; his patient dies. The melodrama that starts at this point is no less real because it exists not in the world of reality but in Dr. Dumartin's sick and tortured imagination. It consists first of his efforts to escape his sense of guilt, later of his colleagues' efforts to restore his sanity.

Accused of murder by the dead patient's wife, Dumartin's first reaction is simple, physical flight. As a means of running away from himself, this is ineffective until, when he is looking down from a bridge, the reflection of his face in the water offers his subconscious mind the solution it wants: he can cease to be Dumartin by the simple expedient of supposing that the real Dr. Dumartin is the reflection in the water. To substantiate this comforting illusion, Dumartin calls to his reflection, finally jumps into the water to find it. When he is pulled out, his fantasy search for Dumartin continues because the only way it could end would be for him to admit to himself his own identity. In the Basle hospital, Professor Tscherko tries ineffectually to break through his subordinate's formidable psychosis, fails because he does not understand it. Eventually, Dumartin's colleague, Dr. Wendt (Tom Kraa), who has more than an inkling of what is wrong, finds a cure which, as simple as the trick which enabled Dumartin's dementia to begin, erases it by removing its motive.

For the mechanical efficiency of the cinema industry, abroad as well as in the U. S., there are unhappy penalties. One is a reluctance to experiment. Author Leo Lapaire, after trying in vain to interest continental producers in his story, wrote the screen play himself, got Composer Anton Profes to write a brilliant score, organized his own company, paid his highly efficient actors with rights to share in the picture's profits. The Eternal Mask won a prize, for "originality of theme," at last summer's Venice Exposition. Last week, released in the U. S. with English subtitles, it was hailed by critics as the ablest cinema study of mental aberration since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Men Are Not Gods (London Film) is based on the triangle of a matinee idol (Sebastian Shaw), his actress wife (Gertrude Lawrence) and a spinster secretary (Miriam Hopkins). When the secretary breaks off her affair with him because his wife is about to have a child, he resolves on that stage-worn device--actually killing his wife when as Othello he is smother ing her as Desdemona. This time, how ever, Desdemona lives to reconquer her Othello.

Miscast as a morbidly jealous wife, Gertrude Lawrence manages to give her role a lynx-eyed dignity which is an excellent foil for the brittle vibrance of Miriam Hop kins.

Black Legion (Warner). Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart), machine-shop worker, has just made arrangements to buy a new car for his wife Ruth (Erin O'Brien-Moore) when he learns that the foreman's job he was counting on has gone to a young Pole. His disappointment makes him susceptible when invited to join a secret organization whose purpose is to prevent foreigners from taking jobs away from U. S. workmen. Ensuing developments, derived from the activities of Detroit's "Black Legion," make the pic ture one of the most effective in Warner Brothers series of industrial problem plays.

Like Black Fury and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Black Legion makes no effort to mollify its message. Robert Lord's vigorous story investigates the Legion from three angles: its effect on Tay lor, its purpose of making money for a crew of cold-blooded organizers, and its own mob activities of night raids, arson, beatings and finally murder. When fear of the police has forced. Taylor to kill his best friend, the picture comes to a climax in a courtroom sequence which achieves a new high for judicial severity on the screen. Good shot: A radio dramatization of Taylor's arrest handled by Director Archie Mayo so that it becomes at once an effective story device and a parody on The March of Time.

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