The New Pictures

My Son, My Son! (United Artists). To hear a movie called a "class picture" sends a chill down the hardened cinemaddict's spine. "Class picture" is a trade term for films with a better than average cast, a resolutely esthetic director, and uplift. They are aimed at people who want ideas with their entertainment. Often they are made from second-rate novels with a purpose. Usually they are bores, frequently they are flops. At their best, class pictures can be as good as We Are Not Alone, which Paul Muni and Flora Robson strove (in vain) to bring to life. Or they may be as bad as Vigil in the Night. Or they may be pedestrian and pretentious like My Son, My Son !

Earnestly directed by Charles Vidor, this picture cinematizes Howard Spring's best-selling English novel about a best-selling English novelist, who, having sired an easily spoiled son, does everything he can to spoil him. Brian Aherne is the excessively fond father. Louis Hayward (with a popeyed, bigmouthed, knowing leer) plays the wayward son who, after failing to seduce his future stepmother (Madeleine Carroll), succeeds in seducing the daughter (Laraine Day) of his father's best friend (Henry Hull). In the book the son dies by hanging, in the picture he dies a hero in World War I.

But in transferring this doleful drama to film, the producers have also transferred (without improving) the novel's main dilemma. Boiled down it is: how to make convincing the relationship between a father, who behaves like a doting old maid, and a son, who is a little too bad to be true.

The Primrose Path (R. K. O.) was a rollicking stage play about a gamy family whose life and loves were as broad as their humor was low. Grandma was the central figure, and what a figure. She did and said whatever she liked, and Grandma liked it carnal. Her gay married daughter ran her a close second. And her tough little granddaughter was never far behind. There were some other characters in the play, but they were poor ordinary mortals whose problems seemed sordidly normal beside this engagingly ribald trio.

All this has been transformed by the magic eye of the camera and the Hollywood touch. As a film, The Primrose Path has become a problem picture with false notes from Steinbeck. Grandma (Queenie Vassar) still likes it carnal, is still a coy and bawdy frump, still gets an

Occasional laugh. But it is uneasy laughter. For the wicked old lady is seen debauching her young granddaughter (Joan Carroll), trying to debauch her teen-age granddaughter, Ellie May (Ginger Rogers). Their mother (Marjorie Rambeau) has become a wistful and underpaid trull, the sole support of her family and her gin-drinking scholar husband (Miles Man-der). Ellie May, a pig-tailed slum Diana, is barely saved from her mother's fate by Joel McCrea as she is racing (in a big car with her mother's ex-boy friend) toward San Francisco and sin.

As a vehicle for the waxing dramatic talents of Ginger Rogers, The Primrose Path is something of a tumbril. This is too bad for serious Cinemactress Rogers and Director Gregory La Cava, who has produced such topnotchers as Stage Door and My Man Godfrey.

Also Showing The Human Monster (Monogram). Repeated discovery of corpses on the mud flats of the Thames River causes Scotland Yard to suspect foul play. Proving it onvolves Inspector Holt (Hugh Williams), Dr. Orloff (Bela Lugosi) and Diana Stuart (Greta Gynt) in some routine Edgar Wallace blood-chilling in a mysterious home for blind men.

CURRENT & CHOICE

The Fight for Life (Dudley Digges, Myron McCormick, Storrs Haynes, Will Geer, Dorothy Adams, Dorothy Urban, Effie Anderson; TIME, March 25).

Pinocchio (Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, Geppetto, Figaro, Monstro J. Worthington Foulfellow, Giddy; TIME Feb. 26).

The Grapes of Wrath (Jane Darwell, Russell Simpson, Henry Fonda, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Eddie Quillan; TIME Feb. 12).

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