The New Pictures

Slim (Warner) is a story of electric linemen, the high-wire workers employed in constructing and repairing the country's power lines. With minimum resort to dramatic contrivance, it presents certain interlocking episodes in the lives of Linemen Red Blayd (Pat O'Brien) and Slim (Henry Fonda). It begins when Slim, a farm boy fascinated by the hazardous function of the linemen putting up a transmission tower, asks for a job; it ends, after Red falls to his death in a high-wire accident, with Slim climbing a tower in a blizzard to resume the repair job thus interrupted. Told with a drawling, mournful humor, the film builds up to a little epic in the sardonic idiom of one of the world's most necessary, most dangerous, least publicized trades.

Slim got his job because a butter-fingered lineman dropped a condenser and got fired. Red Blayd liked him. Red was independent as a king. He was the most respected man on that power job. He could have been a construction boss, but preferred a footloose life, wandering from one line job to another, working until he had a roll and then living high until he had to go to work again. First Slim was Red's "grunt" (groundman). Slim sent up tools as needed on the hand line, tossed up bolts which Red caught with the nonchalant magnificence of a big-league outfielder. When a lineman with a hangover dropped off a tower and got killed, Slim stopped being a grunt. He was so proud of his lineman's belt he hated to take it off at night. Because Red wouldn't stand for any big lip from the man sent to investigate the accident, he and Slim headed Red's old car for Chicago.

Cally (Margaret Lindsay) was a nurse who had taken care of Red when he was hurt once. In Chicago, he always looked her up. Cally taught Slim to dance. Talking to Red was no use, but Cally tried to get Slim to quit line work. Slim turned down Cally's plea. He strung along with Red.

On their next job there was a fight. Wilcox (Joseph Sawyer), a lineman jealous of Red's prestige, tried to loosen the line that was dropping Red. Slim got to Wilcox in time. He and Wilcox were both hurt. When Slim wrote the news to Cally, she came out to nurse him. She fixed it for him to have a job in maintenance, where he could stay put and raise a family. Once more Slim thought he'd go with Red, so Cally called off their wedding. Climax in the contest between love for Cally and the job of being a lineman came in the power-house yard on a snowy night, with the ends of hot wire, broken by the cold and the weight of ice on them, flapping in the wind till the high voltage lines nearby, on which they struck, short-circuited like torches, with the blast of a million electric chairs, That was when Slim, after Red's body fell across the wires and exploded like a fuse, left Cally and went up the tower again.

Splendid is the screen play of William Wister Haines, who adapted his own novel, no other writer participating; praiseworthy the showmanship of Producers Hal Wallis and Sam Bischoff for keeping out the hokum that could easily have spoiled a thrilling picture. The magnificent generating-plant shots were made at Boulder Dam by Cameraman Byron Haskin. Other great scenes--the fight in the poolroom; Red and Slim racing up a wooden tower; Pop's face (J. Farrell MacDonald) as he watches Slim throw his first bolt to Red; Red and Slim tearing along a dirt road on their way to a job. Best and most important element of Slim is the skilful underplaying of Henry Fonda. Following an entirely different but hardly less excellent role than in You Only Live Once, Slim ought to make young Mr. Fonda thought of when Academy awards are handed round.

The Girl Said No (Grand National), first full-length feature produced on Grand National's new lot, marks the film debut of Librettist William Schwenck Gilbert & Composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan. To stage Gilbert & Sullivan in the U. S. costs nothing in royalties, because no U. S. copyrights ever existed except for The Pirates of Penzance. But because the D'Oyly Carte Company of London has blocked screenings in Great Britain by setting impossibly high royalties on the original versions, Hollywood has heretofore shunned the popular, 19th-Century comic operas.

Grand National simply proceeded with versions pirated from authentic London performances half a century ago by representatives of U. S. managers. The singers, easily recruited, are veterans of old U. S. stock companies: Frank Moulan, William Danforth, Vivian Hart, Vera Ross. Studio budgets being limited, Grand National's script demanded no lavish sets of the kind generally used for musical extravaganzas. The device used to assemble the best bits of Gilbert & Sullivan for the screen was to write a story around a group of unemployed singers who pass their idle evenings singing in a cellar.

Jimmie (Robert Armstrong), a braggart race-track bookie, bets Chuck (Harry Tyler) and Pick (Ed Brophy) $1,000 that he can date Pearl (Irene Hervey), a dime-a-dance girl at Swingland, without spending over $10. It costs him his whole bankroll as well as the bet. To trick her into paying his debt, Jimmie renews her acquaintance, masquerades as a theatrical talent scout anxious to promote her. Having contracted to put her name in lights within 60 days for a $1,000 fee, he suddenly encounters the defunct Hathaway troupe. Rehearsing for old times' sake, they trill beautifully through ''It Really Doesn't Matter" (Ruddigore), "The Magnet & the Churn" (Patience), ''Poor Little Buttercup" and "Monarch of the Sea" (H. M. S. Pinafore).

Jimmie convinces the Hathaways that Pearl, whom he introduces as Virginia Lee, a cultured, stage-struck socialite, will back their company if she is given a bit part. Vehicle for the Broadway opening is The Mikado, with Danforth singing the lead, Frank Moulan the Lord High Executioner, and Irene Hervey, most fetching in a kimono, chorusing Three Little Maids from School with Vivian Hart and Carita Crawford. The finale is interrupted when conscience, stirred by the sound of approaching police sirens, impels Jimmie to reveal that the show has no backing and the house has been "papered" (packed free)--a confession which evokes unanimous demands for the show to continue, and Pearl's forgiving embrace.

For the foreign version of The Girl Said No, music from Princess Tingaling was substituted. Against U. S. screenings the D'Oyly Carte Company, whose British copyrights will not expire until 1961. can only protest. All credit for this costless coup goes to Producer Andrew L. Stone, who was immediately signed up by Paramount.

A Day at the Races (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Groucho Marx washes his hands in a basin, discovers that he has his wrist watch on. He removes it. puts it on a table, notices a bystander eyeing it. He puts it back in the basin, says: "I'd rather have it rusty than missing."

Chico Marx runs an ice cream wagon at a racetrack. When he spies Groucho placing a bet on Sun-Up, he intercedes, sells the visitor a tip. When Groucho fails to understand the tip. Chico produces a code book from the ice cream wagon, sells Groucho the code book. When Groucho fails to understand the code book, Chico sells him a master code book. By the time the transaction ends, Groucho has a whole library of code books. Chico has Groucho's money, which he bets on Sun-Up.

At a cabaret entertainment, Harpo Marx finds his way to the piano, starts to play Rachmaninoff's Prelude. When he hits a bass note, the piano begins to misfire. When he plays allegro, the top flies off. When he becomes angry, all the keys begin to fly around his ears. Pleased, Harpo removes the strings, uses them for a magnificent harp solo.

Jokes like these, peculiar to the Marx Brothers, are somehow as funny on the screen as they are unfunny in print. A Day at the Races, which took a year to make, is happily distinguished from previous Marx pictures in that it contains more of them. A wild, complex, totally implausible fable about a run-down sanatorium, its impudent porter (Chico), an imported horse-doctorphysician (Groucho) and the steeplechase in which a speechless jockey (Harpo) gets the money to pay off the sanatorium's debts through his brilliant ride on a horse who hates the gambler who is trying to buy the sanatorium for use as a casino--it all adds up to nothing at all except superlative entertainment. A gag sequence omitted but photographed for advertising purposes was one in which Horse-Doctor Groucho plied his trade on a horse that fitted perfectly into the Marx family.

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