The New Pictures

Roxie Hart (20th Century-Fox) is dedicated "to all the beautiful women in the world who have shot their men full of holes out of pique." A rewrite by Producer Nunnally Johnson of Maurine Watkins' 1926 Broadway hit Chicago, it is a bawdy farce of the bad old '205, when a pretty murderess was as likely to get ten weeks in vaudeville as the electric chair.

"This county wouldn't hang Lucrezia Borgia," a reporter (Lynne Overman) informs Roxie Hart (Ginger Rogers), redheaded, gum-chewing, wisecracking dancer, whose husband has just shot her lover and pinned the murder on her. Convinced that she can't have a career and be innocent, too, Roxie agrees to stand trial and let the newspapers "put her right up there" with Peaches Browning, Queen Marie, Ruth Snyder and Red Grange.

She hires the town's best criminal lawyer (Adolphe Menjou), a "simple, barefoot mouthpiece" who knows no law but does know juries, enjoys the run of her jailhouse, overcomes the headline competition of Two-Gun Gertie (Iris Adrian) by professing to be with child, stampedes the jury into freeing her. A telling point: Menjou, bearing the swooned Roxie in his arms, stands before the judge and elocutes: "The defense rests."

Although Roxie Hart makes a hilarious burlesque of Chicago's Keep-Cool-With-Coolidge, Keep-Cockeyed-With-Capone era, it is often too overdone for superior farce. Mouthpiece Menjou and Newsman Overman make mincemeat of their fat roles; America's own Ginger Rogers is attractive but unbelievable in hers. The star plays second fiddle to the era.

Classic sequence: Roxie's farmer father, informed by long distance that his daughter may lose her life, returns unruffled to his rocker, meditates awhile before observing to his wife: "They're going to hang Roxie." Replies the mother with equal equanimity: "What did I tell you?"

Captains of the Clouds (Warner) is virtually a documentary of Canada's large part in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. And it is a very pretty picture as long as it sticks to its subject. Chock-full of Royal Canadian Air Force men, bulging with the atmosphere and habiliments of their training, it also has more than its share of the lushest Techni-colored flying shots yet made.

But Captains also has a plot: an old story about some north-woods bush pilots (James Cagney, George Tobias, Reginald Gardiner, et al.) who have to learn that modern air combat is a young man's business. Cagney complicates matters further by appropriating another busher's girl (Brenda Marshall). He squares everything in the end by fatally ramming a pesky Messerschmitt 109 with his weaponless bomber-thus clearing the Atlantic crossing for the rest of the ferry pilots, who high-tail it for England while he drops dizzily into the sea.

Although Cagney is much better than his thankless role, the real heroes of Captains are Director Michael Curtiz and his five cameramen, who caught the matchless greens and browns of Canada's infinite north-country; the black-and-crimson spit & polish of the Northwest Mounties; the kaleidoscopic carnival of the training field; the silver splash of bushers' planes plopping into lonely lakes; the ominous shine of penguin-bellied bombers groaning up from the Newfoundland shore on their weary way to England.

Canada's own Air Marshal and World War I Ace, William Avery ("Billy") Bishop, has a role to play in the picture: awarding wings to 1,000 R.C.A.F. cadets. They are an international force (Australians, New Zealanders, Americans, etc.), and the camera pauses to scan their faces: young, fresh, earnest, consolingly cocksure.

Our Russian Front (Artkino). Skillfully put together by Director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Producer Joris Ivens (The Spanish Earth) from thousands of feet of Soviet newsreels and shorts, this is an informative record of the Russians' 150 days that shook the world.

The film shows the massive, single-purposed manpower of Russia at work backing up the fighters at the front: workers threshing the grain a step ahead of the Nazis, child sentries in the wheat fields, elders evacuating villages to draw the Luftwaffe's sting, new roads and railroads inching through the Urals, factories, scientists, guerrillas, the scorched earth-all the war-going activities of a people who have found out what they are fighting for.

Although Our Russian Front must be only a raw foretaste of documentaries yet to come out of World War II, it shows what strong meat those future documentaries will be.

Design for Scandal (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a libel on the U.S. bench. It exhibits Jurisprudence (tall, dark and handsome Rosalind Russell, a female judge) knuckling under to Cupid (tall, dark and handsome Walter Pidgeon, a reporter). This farcical victory is won by Newsman Pidgeon over Judge Russell after she has awarded his employer's (Edward Arnold) wife so much alimony that he has to earn $18,000 more a month to pay it and has to send Pidgeon to frame the judge, into the bargain. Characteristically, the judge won't admit that she loves the reporter except under cross-examination in court.

This is the sort of picture that Hollywood can turn out standing on its head. It has its moments, but they are scarcely worth waiting for.

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