The New Pictures

Made for Each Other (United Artists-David Selznick) starts with a printed announcement on the screen: "Greater New York has a population of 7,434,346, among the least important of whom is. . . ." The camera cuts to a page of the Manhattan Telephone Directory and telescopes down on the name of "John Mason, lawyer." The opening action shot then shows Mason (James Stewart) pausing on his way to work to examine something he is carrying--a cabinet-size photograph of his wife (Carole Lombard).

From this point on, Made for Each Other proceeds to turn its prefacing remark into a bare-faced lie. In the theatre, the "importance" of a character depends solely on how much he matters to an audience. By the time John Mason, having reached his office, tiptoes in to ask his boss for two weeks off in which to take a honeymoon, the question of whether he will get it or not will matter, to the average cinemaddict, almost as much as though the honeymoon were his own.

The story of Made for Each Other is not really a story at all. It is merely the record of experiences--some funny, some tragic, but all appallingly convincing--shared by the Masons in the first two or three years of their life together. The record includes the consequences of a cold the baby catches because he has to sleep in the dining room; the disaster caused when a maid-of-all-work leaves in the midst of a dinner party; the results of John Mason's request for a raise; difficulties between Jane and her mother-in-law; a New Year's Eve quarrel between John and Jane. The climax, such as it is, arrives when their infant son wrinkles his face with boredom and refuses to say Daddy. At this point John and Jane Mason have ceased to be merely important and become two of the most memorable personages who have ever come to life upon a strip of celluloid.

Made for Each Other was produced by David Oliver Selznick, directed by John Cromwell, written by Jo Swerling and acted, principally, by James Stewart and Carole Lombard. Which of these deserves most credit for the indisputable fact that this mundane, domestic chronicle has more dramatic impact than all the hurricanes, sandstorms and earthquakes manufactured in Hollywood last season is a mystery which does not demand solution. What does demand solution is why, when Hollywood can make pictures as sound as Made for Each Other, it practically never does.

You Can't Cheat an Honest Man

(Universal). Confronted with the task of making a picture in which W. C. Fields is the star, most Hollywood producers harass themselves and Mr. Fields by trying to chivy him into playing the part written for him, instead of letting him alone in his own classic interpretation of W. C. Fields. In this case, Producer Lester Cowan shrewdly devised a new technique. Instead of paying his stars a salary, he persuaded them to work on a profit-sharing basis, had Fields write his own story and let matters take their course. The result was that the shooting of You Can't Cheat an Honest Man--completed for a mere $400,000--amounted practically to a miniature Hollywood revolution.

The whole project was accompanied by riotous lack of discipline, and its completion was the signal for two of the liveliest Hollywood parties of the season, one given by Edgar John Bergen for the whole cast, and the other by the Masquers Club in honor of Mr. Fields. At the latter, Dr. Leo Rosten, making a Carnegie Corporation survey of the cinema industry, paid touching tribute to the guest of honor: "Any man who hates babies and dogs can't be all bad." Not the least astonishing thing about You Can't Cheat an Honest Man is that it is almost as good fun to watch as it must have been to make. Typical shot: Fields threatening to get McCarthy, with whom he continues his radio feud, a pair of beavers.

Fast and Loose (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) might be described as one of The Thin Man's wilder oats. Needle-nosing after a purloined Shakespeare manuscript, a personable book expert (Robert Montgomery) and his comely helpmeet (Rosalind Russell) run across three murders.

Confronted with such flagrant red herrings as Sidney Blackmer, Alan Dinehart, Reginald Owen, a skulking butler and two furtive juveniles, the sleuthing couple gaily but improbably sniff out the right scent, get their manuscript.

Creator of these bookish detectives is tall, goggled Scenarist Harry Kurnitz, longtime mystery writer for pulp magazines, who writes under the false-whiskery pen name of Marco Page and the influence of Dashiell Hammett. His characters first appeared last spring in a spade-calling mystery novel, Fast Company, in which the main victim was poetically conked with a bust of Dante. Last summer Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice played them first for cinema in MGM's fumigated version. In Fast and Loose, Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell show up as the likeliest pretenders to the places of William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man tradition. For Fast and Loose, Author Kurnitz whipped up a few new fits and starts.

Most startling: Rosalind Russell finding victim No. 2 stuffed into a suit of armor.

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