The New Pictures

Boy Meets Girl (Warner Bros.) goes like a house afire when James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, as a pair of screwloose screenwriters, are expounding their Boy-Girl theory of cinema, imitating two British guardsmen, acting five parts at once in one of their screen plays, generally giving the impression of being possessed of a legion of March hares. But when Boy Bruce Lester meets Girl Marie Wilson, an inclination to dawdle sets in. Both versions of Boy Meets Girl were written by Bella & Samuel Spewack. After much thought last week on the question, Was the play better on screen or stage? critics came to no concerted conclusion, felt sentimentally inclined to favor the Broadway version.

Carefree (RKO Radio). London's Vauxhall Gardens in the 19th Century boasted a carver who could slice ham so thin that one of his hams, it was said, would pave the entire grounds. Waiters serving his translucent slices outdoors held them down with their fingertips to keep them from blowing away. Like all films in which Fred Astaire has figured prominently, Carefree is important for its melancholy songs and its brisk, high-spirited dancing. The farce between the dances, however, is sliced paper-thin.

Greatest problem in devising a screen play for Fred Astaire is how to account dramatically for the fact that he tap-dances better than anyone else in the world. On most occasions he has simply been cast as a celebrated American dancer. In Carefree he explains that he learned to dance in college, then psychoanalyzed himself to find out what he really wanted, discovered that he wanted to be a psychiatrist. He made a success of his profession, built up a pretty practice among the maladjusted skeet-shooting set. When his friend Stephen (Ralph Bellamy) brings his fiancee (Ginger Rogers) to be psychoanalyzed, it turns out that she knows how to dance too. From then on Stephen never has a chance.

Carefree's authors make game of psychoanalysis, are frankly incredulous at the thought of Ginger Rogers' having a subconscious. Psychiatrists will deprecate this skepticism but will join the rest of the cinema audience in applauding Carefree's four dances. Astaire exhibits his skill with a niblick while tap-dancing furiously. Rogers eats too many rarebits and dreams she is dancing with her handsome doctor in slow motion. At a country club dance, Astaire and Rogers startle the patrons by dancing the Yam, no more senseless than the Big Apple, but suffering from the same fault as the out-of-date Carioca and Continental : it looks too hard for the general public and too easy for Astaire and Rogers. Astaire at last drops all pretense of being a psychiatrist and hypnotizes Ginger by the plain old-fashioned method of waggling his fingers; whereupon they dance once more and everything turns out all right.

Spawn of the North (Paramount), a sprawling $1,100,000 Western of the North, describes how Henry Fonda, as law & order, drove Akim Tamiroff, as Russian piracy, out of the Alaskan salmon runs in the early 1900s. Whenever Akim Tamiroff's blackhearted Russians were surprised poaching somebody else's fish trap, they were lynched. When Akim Tamiroff's insults became too much for a man to bear, Henry Fonda got into his fishing boat, went out on the bay looking for Akim with a harpoon gun. When Henry's faithful friend George Raft decided to immolate himself to atone for his evil ways, he steered Akim's schooner into the side of a glacier, where it was crunched beneath icebergs like a toy boat in a studio tank. Even more characteristic of Western traditions are Spawn of the North's womenfolk: Louise Platt, the refined, ladylike girl who learns to love the ruggedness of it all, Dorothy Lamour, appearing in a turtleneck sweater instead of a sarong but with the same effect, as a tough tavern-keeper who will stick to George Raft through thick & thin, no matter what people think.

I Am the Law (Columbia). Part of the campaign now being conducted by Hollywood studios to persuade the U. S. Department of Justice that there is real competition in the cinema business is a competitive race to the screen with accounts of how a mettlesome, unsleeping special prosecutor breaks up rackets. In I Am the Law, Edward G. Robinson looks less like New York's District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey than Chester Morris did (Smashing the Rackets) or Walter Abel (Racket Busters). He plays the part of a law school professor, an authority on criminal law, absentminded, mild as milk. On a leave of absence from his teaching job he takes on the post of special prosecutor, administers it with long-suffering innocence. But the time comes when he loses patience with the local hoodlums, takes off his coat, licks the daylights out of them with his bare fists. When his sabbatical year is over and he goes absently back to law school, the rackets are broken and he has beaten up about everyone in sight.

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