The New Pictures

The Emperor Waltz (Paramount) opens with a bang-up burlesque of glamorous old turn-of-the-century Viennese romance. A stranger, muffled to the snout, snoops romantically along snow-stifled balustrades, peering through windows. Indoors, the

Emperor's ball is going full blast, in charming Technicolor: it looks as if the music of Strauss were pushing all the flower petals in the world in a leisured cyclone, across the gigantic double eagle, inlaid in the polished floor.

The stranger quietly breaks a window, steals in, parks his hat and coat, and with a gate-crasher's false assurance descends a magnificent marble staircase. The aristocratic guests do double takes: it is Bing Crosby, in mufti, still wearing his earmuffs. He promptly cuts in on beautiful, haughty Countess Stolzenberg-Stolzenberg (Joan Fontaine); she tells him she hates him; they go into a waltz, and retire to talk things over. A gossipy dowager (Lucille Watson) explains what's up, in flashbacks.

It seems there was a traveling salesman named Smith (Mr. Crosby), from Newark, N.J., who was trying to sell the Emperor Franz Joseph a talking machine. Smith had an associate, a fox terrier named Buttons--much like the one that looks and listens to the Victor horn. Buttons became interested in Scheherazade, a pompadoured black poodle, and vice versa. The dogs' affair brought Smith and the countess (Scheherazade's mistress) closer together than might be expected, except in a musical. But have mongrels and thoroughbreds, regardless of species, any hope for true, lasting happiness? If you have any doubts, see the picture.

The opening sequence of The Emperor Waltz is an engaging combination of splendor, lightness, and smart moviemaking. From there on out, things tend to sag a bit --but they seldom drag the ground. Producer Charles Brackett and Director Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend) have inherited something of the deftly formalized comic suavity of the late, gifted Ernst Lubitsch. (Sample: three people conversing about irrelevant matters while their metronomically swiveling heads follow a tennis game.)

The musical numbers are also strung along nicely, notably in Crosby's easygoing yodeling song. A good deal of the picture, however, is built on humor about decadence and democracy, prince and peasant, pedigrees and pooches; and on suggesting things through the dogs which the Johnston Office does not allow to be suggested about their owners.

The dogs, are fine, and most of the time the picture kids the old cliches of sex and snobbery briskly and brightly. But before it's over, there is a suggestion that Brackett and Wilder are falling for their own malarkey. Nonetheless, barring a few lapses from good taste, and a kind of bumptiousness about its brightness, this is an agile and entertaining musical.

Lulu Belle (Columbia), a good many years ago (1926), was a spicy play featuring Lenore Ulric as a colored chippy. For this new movie, the heroine has been Aryanized and the plot carefully expurgated of every quality except dullness.

Lulu Belle (played by Dorothy Lamour in a feather boa) is beautiful. She is also heartless. For love of her, men gladly throw away riches, honor and self-respect; but Lulu Belle only sneers and flounces off with a new lover. In a fast rise from Mississippi honky-tonk to stardom on Broadway she manages to ruin a lawyer, a pug, a gambler, a tycoon. After 80 minutes of this somebody shoots her.

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