The New Pictures

The Man Who Came to Dinner (Warner) continues the glorification of that rococo personality, Monty Woolley--known to his friends as "The Beard." As Lecturer Sheridan Whiteside, of George S. Kaufman's and Moss Hart's cutthroat comedy (TMWCTD), Actor Woolley merely transfers to celluloid, for the exquisite benefit of cinemaddicts and posterity, the unexpurgated version of Alexander Woollcott which he played for two years on Broadway. The switch from Broadway to Hollywood is scarcely noticeable.

As almost everyone knows by now, TMWCTD is the tale of a famous crosscountry lecturer who is forced to go to a dull dinner party in Mesalia, Ohio, injures a hip on his hosts' icy steps, and has to stay for weeks. The part, originally created for Woollcott himself, has by this time become at least half Woolley.

Encased in a wheel chair, the egomaniacal, asp-tongued celebrity commandeers the household, forces his hosts to use only the upstairs, runs up a $784 phone bill conversing with all points of the compass, tries to smash his secretary's (Bette Davis) love affair, persuades his hosts' children to run away from home.

The mischief-making despot fills the house with Chinese, penguins, an octopus, a mummy case, etc. He informs his nurse that she "has the touch of a love-starved cobra" regards his physician as the "greatest living argument for mercy killing"; warns his favorite wayward actress (Ann Sheridan), who arrives to pay her respects, not to "try to pull the bedclothes over my eyes"; dismisses his secretary as a "flea-bitten Cleopatra."

Although there is hardly room for the rest of the cast to sandwich in much of a performance between this fattest of fat parts, Bette Davis, hair up, neuroses gone, is excellent as Woolley's lovesick secretary. Miss Sheridan, without benefit of any noticeable direction, looks as lovely, acts as badly as usual. Jimmy Durante, as himself; Billie Burke and Grant Mitchell, as the insulted and injured hosts; Reginald Gardiner, as Noel Coward, are tops.

But TMWCTD is now so much the possession of Monty Woolley that even its authors' right to a share in it seems questionable. Possessor of the most Edwardian visage of his era, bon vivant, trust-funder, darling of Manhattan's cafe society, onetime Yale English instructor, 53-year-old Actor Woolley plays Sheridan Whiteside with such vast authority and competence that it is difficult to imagine anyone else attempting it. As one of his intimates has remarked: "At last the old party has got the role he's been rehearsing for all his life."

The Shanghai Gesture (Pressburger; United Artists) is a film perversion of Playwright John Colton's flaming melodrama of 16 years ago. Most of its original bawdy plot, language, atmosphere and characterization has been removed. Mother Goddam (Florence Reed in the stage version) is now Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson), no longer proprietress of a Chinese bawdy house, but of a gambling casino. As such, she is not sinister but gaudy. So is the pretentious picture.

The Minister from Bolivia has dissolved--probably in the interests of hemisphere solidarity--into an Italian envoy. Poor Poppy Smith (Gene Tierney), highborn, incognito daughter of English Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), has lost many of her vices; she doesn't even smoke opium. Lush Victor Mature, the poor man's Boyer, cast in a role replacing the original Prince Oshima, Poppy's Japanese traducer, is now Dr. (of nothing) Omar, a befezzed, leering, Levantine heel.

The outcome of this fruitless face-saving is a silly tale of the undoing of little Poppy, who is fresh out of a Swiss finishing school, looks and acts it. She has an affair with Doc Omar. This upsets Sir Guy, who is still more upset when he discovers that Mother Gin Sling is his Chinese wife, whom he had long thought dead. That disclosure makes the slightly tarnished Poppy behave so badly that her mother shoots her dead, and everyone goes home.

Shanghai Gesture is notable for its inexcusably bad acting and directing. Magniloquent Director Josef von Sternberg (once plain Joe Stern of Queens) apparently spent a million or so dollars trying to repeat his former success in turning Marlene Dietrich into the screen's No. 1 siren (Blue Angel, Morocco, etc.). He succeeds merely in making Gesture an unexciting series of close-ups of Miss Tierney, a nice, pretty, corn-fed American girl of 21, who is too young and inexperienced for her part.

Louisiana Purchase (Paramount) is the kind of tasteful, tuneful, genial, comic job that Hollywood often boggles. But Paramount knew what it was up to a year ago when it drafted Broadway's Buddy De Sylva, producer of the Broadway original, and made him production head of the studio.

Streamlined and tempered to fit the screen, Purchase has just the right amount of song & dance, patter and production to put over its good-natured kidding of Louisiana skulduggery in Kingfishy days. It also has droll, despondent, befuddled Victor Moore, not quite as broad as on Broadway but just as natural as U.S. Senator Oliver P. Loganberry, the mild-mannered but sea-green incorruptible Yankee who goes to New Orleans to investigate the odd political situation where football players share their salaries with the police.

Good as Mr. Moore is, he has to bank on the turns to stay ahead of Comic Bob Hope, the Flexible Flyer. Each of them is a hilarious mixture of dopey dove and smart serpent. Hope's style of comedy (the dead-pan wisecrack, the unembarrassed exhibition--e.g., demonstrating the correct way to don a woman's girdle) is designed for counterpunching. His performance is patly complementary to that of Victor Moore, who has been around long enough (66 years) to know how to handle enthusiastic young comics without either stealing or being stolen from.

Pleasantest surprise of Purchase is Dancer Vera Zorina, who Technicolors up into a charming comedienne, no longer solely dependent on her main stems.

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