The New Pictures

Seventeen (Paramount). In the 24 years since young Jack Pickford played Willie Baxter in the silent screen version of Seventeen, cinemaddicts forgot how much charm there is in that classic of calf love on Main Street. Booth Tarkington's novel is scarcely a generation old, but the folkways Seventeen describes, the gawky naturalness of most of its young people, the tolerant humor and humanity with which its adults are able to straighten out youth's scrapes, make it seem like something from the far past. Members of the American Youth Congress may not like it. But if they want to know how their parents acted at about the same age, they may never get a better chance to find out.

This account of a crisis in the young manhood of a 17-year-old boy is no more momentous than his change of voice, just as trying. Willie Baxter's puppy passion for Lola Pratt, the Baby Talk Lady, who is "almost a divorced woman," and his adolescent antics are as funny today as when they were written. High spots are still Willie's drastic expedients to get pocket money to woo heartless, flirtatious Lola in style, his stratagems to purloin his father's dress suit, his difficulties with a used-car shark, his running feud with his snoopy, roller-skating little sister (Norma Nelson), his desperate moon-calfing and the beginnings of wisdom. Just as important to the meaning of Seventeen are the watchful restraint and troubled tact with which Willie's parents (Otto Kruger, Ann Shoemaker) try to make him work out of his dilemma on his own. Result: by deftly making youth's callow crisis also a crisis of adult intelligence, Director Louis King and Producer Stuart Walker (who produced the 1918 stage version of Seventeen) have made one of the few recent Hollywood remakes worth remaking.

As Willie Boy Baxter, Jackie Cooper* continues the assiduous typing of himself as the lefthanded, trouble-hunting, likable cub first seen in What a Life.

Rapidly rising Starlet Betty Field, fresh from honors and a broken neck in Of Mice and Men, plays the Baby Talk Lady with a minimum of baby talk, perhaps a little too much brass.

* When Master Cooper recently switched from child parts to juveniles, he sternly put away childish things. Among them: a red-upholstered super-flivver with nine horns, seven headlights, a 22-push-button dashboard. Cinemactor Cooper now travels in a sedate maroon coupe.

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