The New Pictures

52nd Street (Walter Wanger). Time was when Manhattan's 52nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, was just as stuffy as the picture that bears its name. But in the last decade or so Bacchus and Momus have taken over the genteel brownstone houses whence Rhinelanders, Iselins, Fahnestocks, Vanderbilts once set forth in broughams to leave their cards. Today nightclubs jammed with swing bands and floor shows have chased away all but a last handful of old settlers. 52nd Street misses most of the swing, wastes too much time on the old settlers.

Filmed from a story by veteran Cinemauthor Grover Jones, who has never been on 52nd Street, the picture focuses on an upper-crusty family (Ian Hunter, Dorothy Peterson, Zasu Pitts), follows them through 25 years of fussing against change, winds up by converting them all to the new state of things. To make the rapprochement complete, fluttery maiden Sister Zasu sings tintype torch songs in a nightclub floor show, treads lively measures with Hollywood's Sid Silvers, 52nd Street's Jack White.

Two outstanding 52nd Street characters appear in 52nd Street. Scottish Crooner Ella Logan went to Hollywood last year from Leon & Eddie's, a loud, vulgar hot-spot specializing in bawdy songs. Cadaverous, fast-cracking Jack White, rowdy Roscius of 52nd Street's 18 Club, is the film's most authentic touch, although it makes meagre use of his extraordinary repertory. At home in his hurly-burly 18 Club, Comic White welcomes visiting Babbitts with orchestral fanfares and vanishing birthday cakes, dons cop's garb to unsnarl traffic jams around the comfort stations, fishes for hecklers, whom he invariably outwits. His patter songs are masterpieces of non sequitur, leaping with dizzy unpredictability from Dixie dithyrambs to stirring on-to-war blather, with interpolations on foreign and domestic affairs. Louder than, and about as funny as Jimmy Durante, Jack White is 44, has been hoofing, gagging, minstreling, cabareting since 1911. More than anything else in life he loves the New York Giants. During the season, when the Giants fail to defeat their opponents, White posts a sign in his Club: NO GAME TODAY.

It's Love I'm After (Warner Brothers). Five days before this picture's Manhattan opening, discreet advertisements appeared in the columns of all papers except the chaste Times. They read: "If it's love you're after--? call Circle 7-5900." This pressagent come-on was aimed at the "mug trade," to eke out Actor Leslie Howard's acknowledged carriage-trade appeal. The Strand Theatre installed four extra telephone operators, armed them with a disarmingly commercial answer, waited for the fun to start. Of 11,000 calls handled up to opening day, about 60% came from curious women, 20% from tired business men who generally had their secretaries put the calls through for them. It's Love I'm After, not a mugs' picture, needs no such furtive blurbing. It is refreshing, impudent fun: a buoyant cinema making faces at its precise old aunt, the theatre. Actor Leslie Howard (Hamlet to Broadway a season ago) makes most of the faces, in the role of an aging matinee idol whose charms are fatal to impressionable clubwomen, gushing schoolgirls. To his leading lady (Bette Davis, happily restored to comedy) he is a lovable fraud, fond of voicing his feelings in the ringing phrases of Shakespeare and the once-aboard-the-lugger playwrights. To star-struck Olivia de Havilland he is unutterably wonderful. When Olivia's infatuation blinds her to the worth of her suitor (Patric Knowles), Idol Howard decently decides to disillusion her. The plan for such a procedure, his dresser (Eric Blore) agrees, is neatly outlined in one of his early triumphs. The Loving Triangle. But Olivia's adoration thrives on the boorish behavior prescribed by The Loving Triangle, grows to gooey consistency despite insults culled from Macbeth, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew. When Alone in the City, promising a fate worse than death, fails to quench Idolater de Havilland's ardor, Actress Davis steps in with a sad story suggested by Without Benefit of Marriage, and Olivia returns to the embrace of her suitor.

Funniest scenes: Actor Howard shocking a stuffy breakfast group with a Shakespearean outburst on an improperly cooked kipper; Comic Blore trying to signal his master by frantic birdcalls, over determined competition from a nearby aviary.

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