The New Pictures

Night Key (Universal) refreshingly presents famed Bogeyman Boris Karloff as a gaunt, lovable genius at electrical gadgets. Much of the picture's suspense comes from the expectation that he will suddenly revert to monster type. He never does, though he has plenty of provocation.

Nearly blind and dirt-poor, Inventor Dave Mallory (Karloff) devises a burglar alarm worked by electric eyes. He goes to sell it to Steve Ranger (Samuel Hinds), prosperous president of the Ranger System of burglar alarms, which uses wires. In his youth Dave Mallory invented that system too, but Ranger stole it. This time Ranger again succeeds in tricking Mallory, who stamps out snarling: "What I create I can destroy." With, a pocket radio set which will void the old Ranger alarm system, he sets about bringing Ranger to terms.

Helped by a crook named Petty Louie (Hobart Cavanaugh), he enters a jewelry store, heaps all the clocks in one corner, then lets the burglar alarm function. When the Ranger guards arrive, the clocks are all crying "Cuckoo!" Next Mallory opens all the umbrellas in an umbrella shop, does similar whimsies in a dozen other Ranger-guarded stores. Nowhere does he steal anything, but always leaves a note signed "Night Key," reading: "What I create I can destroy." These extraordinary pranks draw the attention of gangsters who kidnap the old man, use his device for stealing. With the help of his daughter Joan (Jean Rogers), a Ranger guard named Jim Travers (Warren Hull) and a number of electrical tours de force, old Mallory manages to surmount beatings, blindness and bullets, finally defeat both gangsters and Ranger. Best shot: a tough gangster named Fingers (Ward Bond) vibrating helplessly from the shocks of a miniature electric chair which Inventor Mallory concocts on the spur of the moment.

Outcasts of Poker Flat (RKO). Pay dirt was running thin at Poker Flat, Calif. in 1851 until a dance hall girl gave birth to a female child in the backroom of Gambler John Oakhurst's saloon, Mr. Oakhurst (Preston Foster) acting as midwife. Because a gold strike coincided with the birth, Oakhurst called the baby "Luck" (Virginia Weidler). His whim of allowing her, at 10, the status of a poker dealer in his place brought him into conflict with Poker Flat's better elements, Rev. Samuel Wood (Van Heflin) and Schoolteacher Helen (Jean Muir). John Oakhurst tried for Helen's sake to change his principles, but the effort was not proof against an invitation to a shooting match. His successful duel with a prospector prompted the Vigilantes to a civic purge. Head of a little group of outcast reprobates, marooned in a Sierra blizzard with provisions dwindling, John Oakhurst cut the cards, turned up the deuce of clubs, cashed in his chips with a derringer so that the rest could live a little longer.

Outcasts of Poker Flat is a synthesis of three Bret Harte stories--the title piece, The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Idyl of Red Gulch. Though skimpily produced, it invokes with a fidelity unusual in a double-biller the wild land and rugged times in which its scene is laid, and the nostalgic charm of the Harte stories. Its worst fault is the failure of explicitness in the last sequence, leaving the audience completely fuddled as to the reason for Oakhurst's suicide. Equally silly are scenes in which the outcasts ride out in warm weather, and a few shots later, without proper time identification, are snowed in, with the Duchess (Margaret Irving) dying from an undetermined cause. Best shot: "Luck" winning a poker hand from Oakhurst.

The Woman I Love (RKO). Lieutenant Jean Herbillion (Louis Hayward), the night before he goes to join his escadrille, falls in love with a handsome Parisienne (Miriam Hopkins) who tells him her name is Denise. At the front, he becomes the close friend and plane-mate of a moody pilot named Lieutenant Claude Maury (Paul Muni). When Herbillion goes on leave, Maury gives him a note for his wife, Helene Maury. Helene and Denise turn out to be the same person. The triangle is straightened out when, back at the front, Herbillion gets killed.

As material for 1937 cinema, this story, adapted from Joseph Kessel's novel L'Equipage, appears to have only one serious fault. Emphasized rather than concealed by the careful direction of Anatole Litvak (a Russian making his Hollywood debut) and the industrious performance of Actor Muni, the fault is that it has been told so many times it has ceased being a story at all. Most banal line: Maury's to Herbillion: "It can't go on like this."

Kimiko (Photographic Chemical Laboratories) is the first Japanese talking picture to be exhibited in the U. S. Shown last week at Manhattan's Filmarte Theatre, which specializes in importations, its net effect was to bore ordinary cinemaddicts, please amateurs of the curious and reassure Hollywood producers that Japan's prolific cinema industry is not a serious menace. Story of Kimiko concerns a domestic crisis in the up-to-date Yamamoto family. Thinking to arrange a reconciliation between her mother, Etsuko Yamamoto, with whom she lives, and her father, Shunsaku Yamamoto, who long ago ran off with a geisha girl, pert Daughter Kimiko Yamamoto goes to visit Shunsaku, get his consent to her marriage. Up to this point, the plot of Kimiko somewhat resembles that of Universal's Three Smart Girls (TIME, Dec. 21). The end of the picture not only differs from its U. S. counterpart but offers a moral which in a U. S. script would strike the Hays organization dumb with horror. In the first place, Kimiko fails to negotiate the reconciliation. In the second, the reason for her failure is that the geisha proves to be a charming and gracious lady with whom her father finds life eminently satisfactory. Faced with this situation, Kimiko makes the best of it. She invites Shunsaku to her wedding, then leaves him to his own devices.

Written, acted and directed with contempt for dramatic emphasis of any sort, Kimiko is nonetheless realism of a sort which might be expected to please Occidental audiences but for one thing. Whatever may be the advantages of the Japanese ideal of facial immobility, it is not conducive to interesting closeups. Good sequence: Shunsaku and Etsuko, about to celebrate their first meeting in 15 years by a visit to an exposition, arguing about whether to walk or take a taxi.

In view of natural handicaps, progress of the Japanese cinema industry has been sensational. Started more than 25 years ago, it reached its peak between 1929 and 1931 when Japanese producers made more full-length pictures than any other country including the U. S. Silent Japanese pictures were accompanied by a benshi (announcer) who stood on the stage, explained the action to the audience. Because the benshi objected, talking pictures were accepted less rapidly in Japan than the U. S., impeded the industry's progress. In 1936, 496 feature pictures were made in Japan, 369 with sound, 127 without. Of Japan's 1,767 theatres, 1,469 are now wired for sound. Admission prices are from 3-c- to 40-c-. Japanese movie attendance in 1936 was 80,000,000 to 4,000,000,000 in the U. S. Three major Japanese producing companies are Shochiku, Shinko Eiga and Nikkatsu. Biggest is Shochiku, capitalized at 18,103,750 yen ($15,279,545); Nikkatsu, with a capital of 8,000,000 yen ($6,752,000) controls the largest circuit of 600 theatres. Photographic Chemical Laboratories is a minor company which makes 20 pictures a year.

First Japanese pictures were costume dramas of life in feudal days, comparable to U. S. westerns. Talkies, more realistic than silent pictures, have helped popularize up-to-date stories of modern Japanese life. Because U. S. pictures, of which Japan imports some 300 a year, exhibit successful actors in backstage stories as affluent, modern Japanese pictures often show the same thing. Actually, the Japanese cinema, like most other Japanese industries, is organized on the cheap labor principle held over from feudal days.

Japanese Hollywood is Ofuna, 50 minutes south of Tokyo. Japanese method of developing cinema stars is highly systematic. First step is a public announcement by a studio that screen tests will be given to anyone who wants to take one. Second step is signing aspirants whose tests have been successful to long-term contracts. Third step is a one-year course of lectures and stock roles in the dramatic school maintained by every major studio. Last step is a series of parts of gradually ascending importance to test the potential star's appeal. A few Japanese cinemactors like Actor Suisei Matsui, who visited Hollywood in 1930 to appear in a Japanese version of Paramount on Parade, are onetime benshi, who changed their profession when talkies arrived. A few others, like Sachiko Chiba, who plays Kimiko, were recruited from the Japanese stage which still flourishes. Sachiko Chiba, whom U. S. critics last week rated a Nipponese Sylvia Sidney, is currently the actress whose face most frequently adorns the covers of the fan magazines, which are as popular in Japan as in the U. S. Top salaries in the film industry--$150 a month--go to writers and directors. Sachiko Chiba, better paid than most of her rivals, gets $100 a month.

Love from a Stranger (Trafalgar). Adapted from a play by Frank Vosper (who last month disappeared in mid-ocean), this film investigates the prelude to a quiet murder in a British country house. The afternoon she advertises her flat for rent because she has just won first prize in a Paris lottery, Carol Howard (Ann Harding) receives a prospective tenant in the person of Gerald Lovell (Basil Rathbone), whose worldly manners soon so charm her that she marries him. After a gay honeymoon in Paris, they settle down together in a Kentish cottage, paid for with funds which Gerald has borrowed from his wife. Life in the cottage is idyllic until one day Carol chances to open the door into the cellar darkroom where Gerald practices his hobby of photography. After the storm of rage which her visit provokes, audiences are not totally unprepared for the shock which comes to Carol when, examining a book about famous unsolved crimes, she recognizes her husband's face under a fringe of sandy whiskers in the portrait of a man who has killed three women by marrying them and luring them to cozy country pieds-`a-terre. Or for what ensues when Gerald invites Carol to come downstairs and help him tidy up the darkroom.

U. S. audiences, long accustomed to enduring without means of retaliation her displays of smug feminine understanding, may derive sneaking, sadistic satisfaction from the fate that overtakes Ann Harding in this picture. Otherwise its excellence is impaired when, in an attempt to achieve a horrifying contrast with the subdued tone of earlier sequences, Director Frank Lee permits his cast to overact the climax with some of the wildest grimacing witnessed since the screen became articulate. Good shot: Gerald excusing himself in a Paris cabaret to pick out his favorite brandy, in the cellar.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.