The New Pictures

You're A Sweetheart (Universal) is a sorry reversion to the type of cinemusical that cluttered up the primeval age of sound. Dwarfed by gigantically phony settings, actors who seem like puppety moppets make themselves ridiculous by chirping like birds in feathered finery, by performing unlovely routines in ballet groups. Songstress Alice Faye. borrowed from Twentieth Century-Fox for this howdydo, almost succeeds in putting over the title song and one called My Fine Feathered Friend in spite of directing that dotes on facial closeups. What little plot there is burdens Miss Faye with just enough straight dialogue to demonstrate that she has a cute case of minus Rs. She is not at her best hoping that her dweams may come twue. She is at her best in the film's finale, swinging practically over the garden wall on the rhymes and rhythms of When You and I Were Young, Maggie. The other bright spot in You're A Sweetheart is Dancer George Murphy who, after more than ten years of hoofing, is emerging as Fred Astaire's serious rival. His dancing to Scrapin' the Toast is as nicely timed as a fast double play, and considerably more involved.

Most of the good taste at Universal nowadays is lavished on Deanna Durbin musicals and first-rate program pictures. Before the present syndicate, headed by Manhattan Banker John Cheever Cowdin, bought out aging "Uncle Carl" Laemmle. Universal was famous for horror pictures, starring the late Lon Chancy, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Low point of You're A Sweetheart--a gilded living effigy (A. A. Trimble) of the late Will Rogers, rising on a pedestal amid a throng of cowgirl cuties, who stand with reverently bowed heads--is in the old tradition.

Tovarich (Warner Bros.) was cinematized from the successful Jacques Deval play about White Russian refugees in Paris. Warner Brothers are supposed to have paid $100,000 for the screen rights but spent $1,300,000 more to make certain that the cinema would be just as successful as the play. They borrowed three of the screen's most persuasive players (Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Basil Rathbone), hired a Russian-born Parisian director (Anatole Litvak) to insure a continental flavor and gave him an unlimited budget. The result is a mature, highly enjoyable cinecomedy not too slavishly adhering to the form of the original.

It is quite a shock to the Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna (Claudette Colbert) when she is informed that the Bastille is something more to Frenchmen than a mere station on the Metro. Indignantly she and her consort, General Prince Mikail Alexandrovitch Ouratieff (Charles Boyer), flee the Quatorze Juillet fete on the Left Bank, sneak past their unpaid landlord into the grotesque poverty of their room in the Hotel du Quercy. There, where their bed collapses and Tatiana tears Mikail's shirttails to make handkerchiefs, they resolutely decide to accept domestic situations rather than dip into the 40 billion francs (gold) left in Mikail's trust by the Tsar.

Thereafter the story rolls merrily along with Tatiana and Mikail, who change their names to Tina and Michel, converting their bourgeois employers to White Russian ways. Young Georges (Maurice Murphy) learns fencing and poker from Michel, vies with his father (Melville Cooper) for Tina's favor. Mama Dupont (Isabel Jeans) and pretty daughter Helene (Anita Louise) vie for Michel's. One evening Soviet Commissar Gorotchenko (Basil Rathbone) comes to dinner, prepared to sell out the Russian oil rights in Baku and Petrovolsk unless he can get his hands on the 40 billion Tsarist francs. Gorotchenko is an old acquaintance of the Ouratieffs. In revolutionary days he had tortured Mikail with burning cigaret ends, "questioned" Tatiana in a highly questionable manner. That he is not without a certain charm, in spite of his villainy, is evident when he leaves the Dupont household with the Tsar's 40 billion. In return he promises to have the mustache erased from Tatiana's portrait in the imperial palace.

Hollywood looks to Claudette Colbert for its highest grade of upper crust, and in Tovarich Actress Colbert never lets Hollywood or the play down. She is imperious, embittered, chauvinistic to the last shattering Tsarish toast. Charles Boyer, freed again from the limitations of prescribed parts (Archduke Rudolf of Austria in Mayerling, Napoleon in Conquest), enjoys writing his own ticket as Prince Ouratieff, helps the film through its dull beginnings by incorrigibly slurring over unimportant dialogue. In his brief, belated appearance, suave, self-assured Basil Rathbone, as usual, steals the show.

Rosalie (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Since Actor Nelson Eddy was schooled for five weeks by Lieut. Frederick M. Thompson in the proper bearing of a West Point undergraduate, it is obvious that no embarrassment to the Academy was intended by casting him as Cadet Dick Thorpe, No. 1 West Point football player, aviator and singer. Nevertheless, there are times when even civilians feel uncomfortable about the things he does in Rosalie. There is a march to a supper dance after a football game when a lot of chorus boys dressed up in cadet uniform link arms four abreast and follow Eddy and Ray Bolger, wagging their heads and singing The Caissons Go Rolling Along. Whether a West Pointer would sing a serenade outside a Vassar dormitory, even if he could sing like Eddy, remains dubious but just possible. Less possible is the reply made by Cadet Thorpe when Rosalie (Eleanor Powell) sticks her head out of the window and asks him who he is and what he is doing: 'I'm your dream soldier reporting for duty."

Rosalie is the princess of a Balkan court who has gone to Vassar incognito. She has to return to Romanza for the spring festival, but Eddy promises to meet her there. To keep his promise, he makes a dashing solo hop across the Atlantic Ocean. He does not know Rosalie's last name but she has told him she will be wearing a pierrette costume at the fete. Sitting in the box of the King (Frank Morgan), Cadet Thorpe is discouraged by witnessing a gigantic ballet executed entirely by girls in pierrette costumes, but almost immediately Rosalie is carried in on top of a drum 16 feet high. With the invariable Powell black silk stockings covering a pair of legs which, though beautiful, are sexless, superhuman and morbidly adept, as if animated by a baleful intelligence of their own, Rosalie dances down a flight of 15 other drums, the last one only 12 inches high. This is the best dance in the show.

Best number: blonde, eye-filling Ilona Massey (real name: Hajmassy) singing Spring Love Is in the Air. Actress Massey was imported from Budapest last year because she combined ripely nubile beauty with an opera-trained voice. MGM now has Hollywood's largest foreign colony, recruited largely from along the Danube. A few: Luise Rainer, Delia Lind, Rose Stradner, Lili Hatvani, Stephen Bekassy , Hedy Lamarr, Konstantin Gorian. Still unapprehended is the studio wag who last November posted on the MGM gates a sign in Hungarian, meaning "English Spoken Here."

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