The New Pictures

Of Human Hearts (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is dedicated to the proposition that a boy's best friend is his mother, proves its point by the legend that Abraham Lincoln once summoned a young officer from a Civil War battlefield to tell him so. But before it begins gesturing at its stagy moral, Of Human Hearts does a patient, workmanlike job of reconstructing life in an early 19th-Century Ohio River outpost. Of Human Hearts follows the lives of a stalwart, righteous circuit rider (Walter Huston), his wife (Beulah Bondi) and his son Jason (as a boy, eleven-year-old Gene Reynolds, as a young man, gangling James Stewart), who revolts against a life of hand-me-down clothes, unreasonable re- straints, two-fisted godliness. When Jason goes to war, the action, divided between battlefield and pasture, falls into great maudlin chunks. Teariest scene: President Lincoln (John Carradine) making Jason Wilkins sit right down in the Presidential chair and write a letter home.

Until shortly before its release on the eve of Lincoln's Birthday, Of Human Hearts had been called Benefits Forgot, a title lifted from Shakespeare's wintry hyperbole on man's ingratitude.* But even Shakespearean titles sometimes lack the necessary box-office smash to put across a photoplay that has no top-ranking box-office names. Late last month MGM ran a radio contest for a new title, paid a $5,000 prize to 17-year-old Roy Harris of Greenville, S. C. The investment produced wide publicity and a title near enough Of Human Bondage (TIME, July 9, 1934) to guarantee any motion picture a flying box-office start.

Romance in the Dark (Paramount) is like most other attempts to hitch the Hollywood wagon to a grand opera star. Its heroine is brunette, oval-faced Mezzo-Soprano Gladys Swarthout, prettiest and most adaptable of the cinema-minded opera singers. Most singing stars by this time walk blindfolded through the story of the girl who has to submit to subterfuge, disguise and heartache to get her chance. Miss Swarthout's version of this old story is pleasantly ingenuous. But with aging John Barrymore pitting his serrated profile against John Boles's open-mouthed full face in a battle of closeups, throughout most of the film, Miss Swarthout's singing interludes come through in furtive fragments. Her repertory includes the Berceuse from Jocelyn while Boles and Barrymore play a ticktacktoe; the Habanera aria from Carmen, shot through with closeups of Actor Boles asleep; and Rimsky-Korsakov's Song of India, during which she finally manages to get the camera's undivided attention. Best-staged sequence in the film, however, is her singing with Boles of the duet from Don Giovanni.

When Romance in the Dark was in the making, considerable fuss was made over a sequence in which Singer Swarthout was pelted with tomatoes by an opera audience. Previewers greeted the scene with no enthusiasm, and it was cut out. Now the only tomato thrown squishes over the Latin features of Tenor Fortunio Bona-Nava.

Gold Is Where You Find It (Warner Bros.) is a Technicolor toast to the stout-hearted California farmers who in the 1870s fought off the mining crowd in the lush Sacramento Valley, saved the land for the California Fruit Growers Exchange. Like most Warner pictures, Gold Is Where You Find It contains capsules of information for the curious, sugarplums for the romantics, action for whistle-&-stomp addicts. With the footnoting style of the documentary film, it begins by sketching the change in mining technique from the pick-&-pan methods of the forty-niners to the high-pressure system of 30 years later. As the rows of hydraulic monitors claw the gold from the hillsides with watery talons, farm lands in the valley below are mucked under by the sluiced silt. Actor George Brent commands the monitors and their tough-mug crews, backed by San Francisco financiers with "ideals and traditions of highwaymen." Shaking their fists from the valley are Farmerette Olivia de Havilland, fiery -Planter Claude Rains and a pack of farmers. The ensuing battle is long, bloody, rough on romance. But the courts finally come through with a restraining order, which the farmers execute by blasting a dam, washing out the mining crowd in one great, glistening, gold-tinted Technicolor flood.

No film of the gold-rush years is considered complete without a garish glimpse of San Francisco boom days. Gold Is Where You Find It takes time out from battle to attend a gilt-edged house party where the whiskery guests of honor are General U. S. Grant (Walter Rogers) and U. S. Senator George Hearst (Moroni Olsen). The Senator confides: "I'm worried about this boy of mine. Willie. . . . He wants to go into the newspaper business." With sympathetic nods the host agrees that there is no money in the newspaper business.

While Gold Is Where Yo Find It was being edited & cut, a hillside in Los Angeles' Elysian Park started shifting, tumbled boulders down on a highway beneath. To the scene rushed Warner cameramen with Technicolor equipment, floodlights for an all-night watch. Script writers got right to work on a landslide sequence to be added to the film. But the hill refused to budge for the cameramen. Last week Nature was more cooperative. As the Warner Bros, prepared to present their film simultaneously in 200 theatres throughout the U. S., flood waters swept out over the Sacramento Valley, inundated farm lands just as the film's flood does.

* "Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot."--As You Like It.

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