The New Pictures

Angel (Paramount) concerns Lady Maria's (Marlene Dietrich) rather pathetic effort to cast off her loyalty to her diplomat husband, Sir Frederick (Herbert Marshall). Angel is not a slut but a wife whose fidelity has been overstrained by Sir Frederick's immersion in diplomacy. And he, for all his fine deliberate charm, is the type of fellow who. when his wife tells him that she has been dreaming, immediately asks: "Of me?"

Lady Maria has already had a bit of a Paris fling with one Anthony Horton (Melvyn Douglas). With some help from coincidence, Sir Frederick meets Anthony, finds they are Wartime buddies, and invites him over to the manse. Lady Maria is still disposed toward fidelity when Sir Frederick decides to go to Geneva alone instead of second-honeymooning with her to Vienna. Slighted, she grants Anthony's plea for a meeting at their Paris rendezvous. Here Sir Frederick, having put two and two together, arrives in time to win her back by knowingly accepting her suggestion that someone else is Anthony's mistress.

Angel is the first picture made by Ernst Lubitsch since he stopped being Paramount's production boss and went back to directing. It is the kind of picture in which the characters move about in carefully articulated poses, in costly sets, talking about their emotions and playing well-bred tunes on the piano. Marlene Dietrich flutters her eyelashes twice before each line about love and once when her feeling is marital fidelity. Her make-up is so sharpened it makes her look gaunt, but nothing can keep her from looking lovely, and she can still be beautiful in clothes nobody else would dare to wear.

In spite of its nonsensical, stilted story and some bad dialogue Angel has a sustained romantic mood, a subdued, shimmering elegance of playing and direction that makes it interesting though silly. Typical line: "Please go. Every moment that you're here my home is in danger."

Conquest (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). For several years Greta Garbo has been toying with the notion of doing a screen play based on the love affair between Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie Countess Walewska of Poland. The notion was in the Hollywood tradition, for most producers like royal historical episodes for an important star. They give the star dignity. If dignity is its purpose, Conquest admirably succeeds. It moves with the fateful and august tread of history itself. Its huge, expensive panorama (running time: 2 1/2 hours, cost: $2,000,000) embraces a quarter of a century and three-quarters of Europe, with the detailed perfection of one of Meissonier's Napoleonic battle-scenes. Aside from being a little dull, the picture has only one major fault. Apparently Producer Bernard Hyman overlooked the fact that if one of the characters in any dramatic piece is Napoleon Bonaparte, and if this character is played up to the hilt by a competent actor, everyone else in the cast is subsidiary.

Hence, although she is nominally costarred, Garbo appears for the first time in 15 years in a supporting role. The real star of the picture is Charles Boyer as Napoleon.

Boyer plays the Little Corporal in the manner every actor under five feet ten has always dreamt of playing him. He pulls his forelock down, sticks out his upper lip, and shows a paunch (artificial). Magnificently he drives into Poland where, changing horses at a village near Marie's estate, he gets his first look at her. Count Walewski (Henry Stephenson) does not much care for the plan that his wife trade on the Emperor's interest to help Poland, but she tries it anyhow. When she interrupts Napoleon's ardors with a patriotic supplication, the Emperor becomes irritated but keeps her in mind. On his next trip he wins her heart with his dream for a United States of Europe. On an illicit honeymoon in Prussia, Bonaparte and Marie are idyllically happy till Napoleon's Europe-shattering job calls him away.

This cogent and moving episode absorbs about an hour of film. For the next hour Screenwriters Samuel Hoffenstein, Salka Viertel and S. N. Behrman seem undecided what to do for story matter. They fall back on the facts taught in schools about their hero's life. Napoleon divorces Josephine (out of camera range). He arranges to wed Habsburg Marie Louise. Marie Walewska is disgusted. Says she: "'The savior of Europe has become a son-in-law." Not until after the retreat from Moscow does Marie have much more to do with the Emperor, except for bearing him a son. At Elba they are reunited and Marie agrees to take a message to his followers, telling them the eagle is returning, cured of royalty, to try once more his dream for the United States of Europe. When the dream has been dissolved at Waterloo, Marie gets her last glimpse of her lover from a window as he starts toward St. Helena.

Victoria the Great (RKO Radio). Shaking from her pretty shoulders the garish costumes of two previous cinema roles--as Nell Gwyn and Peg Woffington --Britain's beloved Anna Neagle last week traced with pomp and piety Queen Victoria's long reign. Because the film is lengthy, because its subject is the most sanctified one in British history, awed critics detoured around its rough spots with wistful allusions to Helen Hayes and Victoria Regina, vaguely said that the picture, presenting almost precisely the same episodes as did Laurence Housman's play, was perhaps about as good. It is not.

Victoria the Great is a whopping English imitation of a whopping Hollywood imitation of whopping English pageantry. In 113 minutes 60 years flicker past. The cast boasts 72 names, innumerable extras, is so huge that the part of Disraeli is taken not by one actor, but by both Derrick Demarney, who looks rather younger, and Hugh Miller, who looks rather older than George Arliss. Splendor nourishes itself on magnificence until, with all England jubilant, the picture bursts into a hopeful climax in technicolor.

In the film's making, Director Herbert Wilcox stressed authenticity above all things. He borrowed Buckingham and St. James's Palaces, Windsor Castle. He persuaded Liverpool Museum to let him use the original, wheezing train which carried the real Victoria & Albert on their real honeymoon. The Royal Mews let him have the genuine Jubilee coach. He hired Dance Historian Lucile Marsh to puff in advance notices that the film's 19th Century dances were not only authentic, but were direct ancestors of the Big Apple. Miss Neagle herself is said to have culled 40% of the dialogue from her prototype's journal, from letters. In the picture she accurately mispronounces her consort's German, Prince Albert (Anton Walbrook) accurately mispronounces the Queen's English, and Abraham Lincoln (Percy Parsons), jammed into a sequence with Old Glory to keep U. S. patriots happy and near RKO box-offices, accurately pronounces American.

Stand-In (Walter Wanger). "You wouldn't want a star to endure the heat of the lights while they set the cameras and microphones, would you? So they dig up a gal ... to stand in for the star while all this torture goes on. . . . When everything's set the star, cool and immaculate, puts her dainty little feet in the chalkmarks. The standin, worn and wilted, fades out of the picture--."

Stand-in Lester Plum (Joan Blondell) explains her functions to Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard), eastern efficiency expert who has come to Colossal studios as stand-in for a bank. Atterbury thinks of picture-making in terms of arithmetic and of picturemakers in terms of cogs and units. At first he occupies a suite in orchid and pale fudge in a famed hotel, but is driven by job-seekers and backslappers to refuge in the boarding house where Miss Plum lives with various cinema people who differ from the successes only in not having jobs. Gradually it dawns on Atterbury that Colossal is being ruined by 1) its ace director (Alan Mowbray), a Russian who wants to send to Switzerland for edelweiss for his Alpine shots, although the edelweiss will not be visible in the blizzard scene for which it is wanted; 2) Cheri (Maria Shelton), a fading actress whose contract makes it worth a cutter's job to take out one of her closeups; 3) Quintain (Humphrey Bogart), a smart, dog-loving producer, driven to drink by his passion for Cheri; 4) Nassau (C. Henry Gordon), a promoter who tries to bankrupt the studios and buy up control.

Red corpuscles eventually replace the decimal points in Atterbury's blood. Miss Plum teaches him jujitsu and the rhumba, becomes his secretary. He refuses to send to Switzerland for edelweiss. He causes Miss Cheri to break her contract under the moral turpitude clause by getting her so drunk she slips under a table in the Biltmore. When the bank sells the studio over his head and fires him, he organizes studio employes to defy the new owner, throws Nassau out with a jujitsu hold, saves Cheri's last picture by having it recut to star a gorilla. Stand-in is the most human as well as the most biting comedy yet written about Hollywood. After its preview, violent protests were made by rival organizations. Twentieth Century-Fox felt uneasiness because Joan Blondell burlesques Shirley Temple singing "The Good Ship Lolly-pop." Report had it that the character of Director Koslofski was a damaging caricature of Josef von Sternberg. Trade papers tittered that Stand-In laughed at the motion picture industry. The last is true, but the laughter is large, warming and contagious. Stand-in is not an acrid satire like Once in a Lifetime or Boy Meets Girl, but a panel of broad, sure dimensions. It shows the bottom as well as the top, emphasizing that the vast army of skilled film technicians, the grips and pincers, the cutters and carpenters, are more pertinent to picture production than the overpublicized screwballs behind the big desks. Much of Stand-in's authentic atmosphere and crisp character delineation is due to the directing of Tay Garnett, much of it to the writing of Gene Towne and Graham Baker, who have developed Clarence Budington Kelland's story into a personal triumph of their own. Always a daring experimenter, Producer Walter Wanger may well find that this defiant guffaw at his own trade is the finest picture he has ever made.

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