The New Pictures

She was born in Budapest 27 years ago and her name was Ilona Hajmassy (pronounced High-massy). At 14, Ilona was a seamstress in a sweatshop, with a will to sing. So Seamstress Hajmassy applied at a Budapest opera house. When its manager asked her what she could do, she told him: "Nothing." He put her in the chorus. There she earned 60 pengoe ($10.50) a month, got no curtain calls. An M. G. M. executive finally spotted her at the Vienna opera, took her to Hollywood, where for six months she crammed dramatics and English, dieted on cottage cheese and skim milk, laid off such Hungarian delights as lekvar (gluey layers of candied noodles). Her first U. S. movie role was a small part in Rosalie, starring Nelson Eddy and Eleanor Powell.

Simple as a Hungarian peasant, beauteous, fun-loving, slenderized Ilona Massey is unspoiled, despite pounds of jewelry and dozens of furs lavished on her by ardent admirers. She likes to wear them to Hollywood hot spots, but she also scrubs her own garage floor on all fours. Blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, she tempers Madeleine Carroll's cool gorgeousness with some of Mary Martin's warmth and a richer voice. The talent scout who uncovered her in Vienna wired: "This is the kind of dame who would look naked wearing a fur coat."

Balalaika (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the first picture in which Ilona, now Massey without Haj, has her first chance to star. Unfortunately, Hollywood has now got the idea that "social significance" has something to do with the amusement business. So the picture, which takes its name from a truncated Russian mandolin, the balalaika, includes not only fatuously lovable grand dukes and musicians, but downright sinister Bolsheviks. It also includes Baritone Nelson Eddy, the Russian Cossack Choir, an excellent cast (Frank Morgan, Lionel Atwill, Charles Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith) and a lot of gorgeous clothing and sets.

Lydia Marakova (Massey) is a pink singer in old St. Petersburg. Her father and brother are Reds. Despite these home influences, Lydia is irresistibly attracted when Prince Karagin (Eddy) begins a kittenish courtship which would set the teeth of a more experienced young woman on edge. Red family friends of Lydia reward Prince Karagin for arranging her operatic debut by shooting his father. Off goes Lydia to Siberia. Off goes Prince Karagin to World War I, the big moment of which comes on Christmas Eve, when Karagin carols Silent Night from the Russian trenches while the Austrians across the way carry the chorus. After that the Russian Revolution breaks out.

Amidst these vicissitudes Songsters Massey and Eddy find time to sing often and well. Ilona Massey sings words to The Young Prince and the Young Princess from Rimsky-Korsakoff's Scheherazade, a duet from Carmen with Nelson Eddy. He sings the Volga Boatman's Song in rumbling Russian, other Muscovite songs in English.

Gulliver's Travels (Paramount). First and best full-length color cartoon was Walt Disney's Snow White. For a while it looked as if it would be the last unless No. 1 Movie Cartoonist Disney made another. But No. 2 Movie Cartoonist Max Fleischer had his own ideas about that. Eighteen months ago, he decided to challenge Snow White by making a full-length cartoon of his own, Gulliver's Travels. According to the publicity from Miami, he had 678 artists at his Florida studio, who turned out 665,280 drawings, used up 16 tons of paper, 49,000 pencils, and consumed 27,600 aspirin tablets for headaches.

It was a noble effort, but in craftsmanship, color, delicacy of treatment and invention, Gulliver's Travels falls considerably short of Snow White, although reminiscent of it: the Prince and Princess (voices by Jessica Dragonette and Lanny Ross) suggested Snow White and her Prince. A character named Gabby sometimes suggested Dwarf Dopey, sometimes talked like Donald Duck. In place of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs, there were about 700 Lilliputians, funny in their own right. Prodigious are their engineering feats in moving Gulliver from the coast to their diminutive capital, graceful is the King's effort to dance with Gulliver's finger for a partner. But the closest Gulliver's Travels comes to invention of Disney calibre are Sneak, Snoop and Snitch, King Bombo's secret agents, to whom he sends letters beginning: "Dear Spies."

Of all his characters, Max Fleischer voted Gabby the most likely to succeed, planned a series of short cartoons for him if he caught on.

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