The New Pictures

Saratoga (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), written by Anita Loos & Robert Hopkins, is possibly Jean Harlow's best picture as well as her last. Glib, forthright, knowing and adroit, released last week to coincide with the opening of the 1937 season at New York's old spa, it investigates the lighter side of the serious sport of horse racing with as much good sense as good humor.

Carol Layton (Jean Harlow), bright sprig of an old family of Saratoga horse fanciers, comes home from England engaged to a New York socialite named Hartley Madison (Walter Pidgeon), whose bankroll is more impressive than his sophistication. To Carol's father's crony, Bookmaker Duke Bradley (Clark Gable) this is good news indeed. He takes it for granted that Carol's only possible object in becoming affianced to a rich nincompoop is to provide financial succor for her father and his friends. Actually Duke, who falls in love with Carol, is quite right but Carol's reasoning has been subconscious rather than calculating. Convincing her where her true interest lies is a lengthy process which entails horse races in Kentucky and Florida, cocktail hour in the United States Bar at Saratoga, an uproarious episode in a Miami hotel room, nocturnal yearling auctions at Saratoga, and a superb horse race after which, by lightening her fiance's pocketbook by $100,000, Duke finally makes Carol see that Hartley Madison is not the man for her to marry. By this time audiences have caught the upswing and excitement of the greatest U. S. betting sport and Lionel Barrymore has had time to steal the picture in the role of Carol's shrewd, hardheaded, horsewise grandfather.

Saratoga was practically complete when its star died last month of cerebral edema. For the few remaining sequences, mostly in the middle of the picture, director Jack Conway used longshots of a double so adroitly that cinemaddicts are not likely to detect Miss Harlow's absence. Good shots: the flamingos at Miami's Hialeah Park; Duke Bradley's assistant (Cliff Edwards) singing a race-track ballad "The Horse with the Dreamy Eyes," in a crowded car on the track special from Maryland; Bradley making book.

High, Wide and Handsome (Paramount). The night in 1859 that Peter Cortlandt (Randolph Scott) takes his grandmother down to Titusville, Pa. to see a medicine show, the show-wagon burns and they take the proprietor's daughter back to their farm. Pretty Sally Watterson (Irene Dunne) is a great help around the barnyard. It takes her longer than it should to make Peter propose but that is because Peter is a trifle backward. Eventually they marry and plan a house on the hill above the cow pasture. All this, told with a maximum of apple-blossoms, old songs and stringed accompaniments is one portion of High, Wide and Handsome, written and scored by the reliable partnership of Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II.

The other portion, blended with the first and running parallel to it, is the equally romantic but far more vigorous story of the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania. The home-drilled well that Peter Cortlandt has rigged up behind his grandmother's house comes in the day of his wedding, spouting a geyser of oil that drenches the wedding party and turns the bride's dress black. What follows is Peter's epic fight with the head of a railroad line (Alan Hale) for control of the new industry. When the railroads boost freight rates to force the farmers to sell out their oil lands, Peter and his friends start a pipe line to the refinery. The railroad's strong-arm gang, headed by Peter's loud-mouthed neighbor, Red Scanlon (Charles Bickford), tries to break the line, buy out the land it crosses. The conflict reaches its peak in a magnificent free-for-all when, racing to put down the last three miles of line before their contract expires, the oilmen farmers are attacked by Red's gang on a rock-bluff. Aided by a carnival troupe complete with elephants, which has been summoned by Sally who knows its manager, Peter Cortlandt and his friends win their fight.

Of the tried & true ingredients for large-scale musical melodrama, High, Wide and Handsome omits none, from folk dancing to the scene in which Sally, temporarily estranged from her husband, sings in a tent show. Produced by Arthur Hornblow in the magniloquent tradition of screen plays like Showboat and San Francisco, directed with broad strokes by Rouben Mamoulian, it is shrewd, symphonic, sentimental mass entertainment, which should satisfy most cinemaddicts, surprise almost none. Good shot: a carnival strong man tossing Red Scanlon into a creek. The Toast of New York (RKO) exhibits Edward Arnold, previously seen as Diamond Jim Brady, General John Sutter and an Oregon lumber tycoon named Bernard Glasgow, as swashbuckling Jim Fisk, whose financial freebooting nearly disrupted Wall Street in the decade after the Civil War. Abetted by his young cronies, Nick Boyd (Gary Grant) and Luke (Jack Oakie), Fisk amiably horn-swoggles pious little Dan Drew (Donald Meek) out of control of the Erie Railroad, then makes a fortune by selling watered Erie stock to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Pursued by the law, he uses the Ninth Regiment, of which he is the Colonel, to help him get across the Hudson to New Jersey, uses the profits from his killing to start a one-day corner on the gold market. When President Grant announces that the U. S. Treasury will release unlimited quantities of gold to stabilize the price, Fisk is ruined. Conveniently, at this crisis in his affairs, he is shot to death by one of a mob of brokers who have just survived "Black Friday." He dies repentant, clutching the pretty paw of Josie Mansfield (Frances Farmer), the obscure little actress whom he has made the belle of New York and who really loves Nick Boyd.

Adapted from two books--a biography of Daniel Drew and The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson--by Joel Sayre, John Twist and Dudley Nichols, The Toast of New York is a lively specimen of prefabricated Americana. It aims to be and is a complete prevarication, impaired only by the fact that Edward Arnold's jowled jollities are indistinguishable from the ones which the U. S. screen's No. 1 specialist in 19th Century captains of finance has used in all his previous portrayals. Good shot: Fisk, Boyd and the Ninth Regiment routing a gang hired by Vanderbilt by turning a hose on them.

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