The New Pictures

A Night in Paradise (Universal) is a heavy yet highly bearable load of laughs at the expense ($2,000,000) of the unstable tyrant King Croesus (Thomas Gomez), his gold-digging fiancee, the Queen of Persia (Merle Oberon), an angry witch-queen (Gale Sondergaard), and the aphoristic ambassador Aesop (Turhan Bey).

Aesop at first is an old man, complete with false beard, false hump, enlarged brow, limp, and wise saws for every occasion. But once he falls for the Persian Queen he turns up in her bedroom dressed in the ancient equivalent of white flannels and looking as if he has just gulped a goldfish and is now quite prepared to polish off Miss Oberon as a chaser. He explains that wisdom such as his is heeded only when the speaker shows marks of age and suffering. The Queen, duly impressed, outgrows her vanity and avarice and cultivates the nicer aspects of her femininity. A few more turns of the plot shove these lovers off a cliff near Delphi, into the most brassily contrived happy ending in quite some time.

A certain amount of this Walter Wanger production is played almost straight; still more is played for sex and spectacle; but basically the picture is like any other old-fashioned burlesque extravaganza about harems and such. The sets are fiercely gaudy, sometimes handsome. The costumers have managed, by fair means & foul, to leave few square inches of Miss Oberon unexploited.

Bedlam (RKO Radio). Tetched Warden Boris Karloff incarcerates Anna Lee in 18th Century London's notorious madhouse, Bedlam (the Hospital of St. Mary-of-Bethlehem). Thanks to the moral support of Richard Fraser, a Quaker, she not only retains her sanity but becomes something of a mental healer. Producer Val Lewton and Writer-Director Mark Robson wring some effective moments of pity and horror out of the assorted lunatics and, as in all Lewton films, the melodrama is used also for more serious purposes--to attack the more callous self-delusions of the Age of Reason, past & present, to advance the idea that love casts out fear. But sincere, artful and scary as the best of Bedlam is, its horror and high-mindedness don't always blend smoothly.

Days and Nights (Artkino) is Konstantine Simonov's adaptation of his novel about the defense of Stalingrad. The heroine, a Red Army nurse, is deliciously pretty; the soldiers' "informal" singing sounds like a command performance before Stalin; the photography is sometimes lushly unrealistic--the picture has, in short, more than a touch of Hollywood-with-Russian-dressing. But the general feeling is warm and real; there are phantasmagoric moments among the ruins of the city; and men still look like men. Days and Nights has no trace of the Russian genius for cinema; but it is better worth seeing than the average U.S. war movie.

Heartbeat (RKO Radio) takes the pulse of a studio Paris, troubled by nothing more portentous than thievery, domestic intrigue and light-heavyweight love. Ginger Rogers, who has escaped from a reform school, shows more aptitude in Basil Rathbone's school for pickpockets. Ambassador Adolphe Menjou, catching her redhanded, uses her for a bit of pocketpicking of his own: he wants to uncover evidence of his wife's infidelity. Dressed to the nines for the occasion, an ambassadorial ball, Miss Rogers falls for her victim, Jean Pierre Aumont. Further complications involve her in a marriage-of-convenience with pouchfaced Melville Cooper, a gentleman loafer, and bring, at length, a less convenient but more promising match with M. Aumont.

All this Cinderella business, which will seem to oldtimers like a Mary Pickford movie with a thick French accent, rolls out smoothly and amusingly enough under Sam Wood's direction. Miss Rogers mugs along to her heart's content and to the content likewise of probably 90% of her audience; Basil Rathbone does some well-cured hamming as the Professor; Mikhail Rasumny is very appealing as the kindliest of his pupils; Menjou, as always, is as smooth as a new foulard. Best thing in the show: Melville Cooper's supple portrayal of harmless, total worthlessness. If Hollywood is looking for someone to fill the shoes of its most likable bon vivant, the late Robert Benchley, Cooper is the man.

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