The New Pictures

Four Daughters (First National-Warner Bros.). Screen plays for actresses (like Shirley Temple) are far easier to provide than screen plays for entire families (like the Dionne quintuplets). Warner Brothers screenwriters, their hands full with Billy and Bobby Mauch, sighed last year when the studio signed Priscilla and Rosemary Lane, whose chief acting experience had been with Fred Waring's

24-piece orchestra. Sister Lola was signed on later.

Four Daughters is a family vehicle as slick and streamlined as a sedan just off the assembly line, as capacious as a 1925 touring car, as comfortably upholstered as a buggy. It concerns itself with the lives of four musical smalltown sisters, the Lemps, three of whom are Lola, Priscilla and Rosemary Lane. Gale Page plays the fourth. What the Lemp girls want and what they get are two different things.

Emma wants a knight on a white horse, gets the florist's assistant next door. Thea wants riches, gets the local business man, who owns a big car and is a pain in the neck. Kay wants fame, gets a spot on a radio hour. Ann wants fun and laughter, gets nothing but trouble.

First half of Four Daughters is pure pastoral. Ann's romance with the composer Felix is getting along gayly when Mickey Borden (John Garfield) hitchhikes out from the city to orchestrate a piece of Felix's music. Ann has never met Mickey's type, dark, rude, bitter as stale tea. On the day she is meant to marry Felix she marries Mickey--a mistake, as cinemaddicts will spot immediately, for Felix is considerably more clean-cut. It takes a year's time and a melodramatic suicide to clear up the situation.

John (formerly Jules) Garfield, like Franchot Tone, J. Edward Bromberg and Luther Adler, went to Hollywood from Manhattan's Group Theatre. In Four Daughters' almost negative cast, he is the sole positive charge.

Sing You Sinners (Paramount) combines the Sentimental Family plot (see col. 2) with the Crooked Horse Race plot --perhaps an influence of the double feature. The Beebe family is distinguished from most cinema families by the fact that one member of it (Fred MacMurray) works. Joe Beebe (Bing Crosby) does not work, not having the knack. He is idle and lazy, with no thrift, energy or regard for the value of money; he drinks, philanders, plays the horses, comes to an only temporary good end. When Mrs. Beebe (Elizabeth Patterson) persuades him to give up the trade of horse racing, he takes up the hardly more stable trade of singing in night clubs. Sing You Sinners is thus no preachment for the typically American virtues, but it is tolerable comedy, jigging playfully from farce to melodrama like a kite with no tail.

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