The New Pictures

Young Man of Manhattan (Paramount). In reviewing this picture, the august New York Times said: "Norman Foster, as Toby McLean, gives an honest and restrained interpretation of a sportswriter for a metropolitan daily newspaper. ..." Whether the Times meant to be sarcastic or complimentary to Norman Foster, it was certainly not flattering to metropolitan sportswriters. By current Hollywood standards, the more or less chronic inebriation of Toby McLean is truly restrained; by the standards of actuality, contrary to all accepted belief, it is somewhat less so. But so far as actuality goes, Foster on the screen has an inestimable advantage over the character in Katharine Brush's best seller: he is flesh & blood; and so, with more decorative effect, is Claudette Colbert as the heroine. Their easy, natural playing brings the brittle characters to life, gets the most out of the glib, skillful, and rather shallow little story about a newsman who quarrelled with his wife because she made him feel inferior and made up with her when he found he could stand on his own legs. Silliest shot: Claudette Colbert going blind after drinking some liquor intended for sportswriter consumption. Claudette Colbert (nee Chauchoin) was born in Paris in 1905. Her French parents, after financial reverses, migrated to Manhattan when she was seven years old. She was studying painting when a friend gave her three lines to say in a play called The Wild Westcotts: "It was a lovely party. ... It must be wonderful to get married.

. . Won't someone get me a sandwich?" She got bigger jobs quickly, went on the road for a while. After rehearsing for an hour, she stepped into the leading part in High Stakes (1925). As Lou in The Barker, she won fame, a cinema contract and a husband (Norman Foster). Her first pic- ture, For the Love of Alike (silent), did not please her; she gave up the idea of a cinema career until talking pictures came in. Cast with Maurice Chevalier in The Big Pond (not yet released), she taught him one word of U. S. slang per day, explaining what it meant in French. Her mother, who lives with her, thinks she will be as great as Sarah Bernhardt. Miss Colbert eats potatoes and eclairs without effect on her figure (103 lb.), never collects press notices, seldom socializes, has not danced with anyone except her husband since her marriage. She enjoys reading Rostand, Conrad and Ferber; she attends the theatre six nights a week when she is not working.

Bride 68 (Tobis). With dialog part English and part German, injected at intervals, usually with the effect of interrupting rather than heightening the rapid, graphic flow of visual imagery, this picture deals with men and women in Australia during the gold rush. The men worked in a harsh country, with a fever that made the values of normal life as remote as the riches of hallucination driving them on. The women came to join them, an adventurous shipload of outcasts, each numbered and assigned in lottery to waiting pioneers. One of the women dies coming over, and the man, a telegraph operator, originally assigned to Bride 68, gets left in the new draw. The picture is a study of what this does to Telegrapher Conrad Veidt, whose ability to interpret the effect of mental sickness on human behavior surpasses even that of famed Alexander Moissi (TIME, Jan. 6). Veidt plays the part slowly, subtly, compellingly, lifting a superior program picture into authentic tragedy. Best shot: 413 dainty ladies, in costumes of the '90s, on their way to hidden destinies.

The Benson Murder Case (Paramount). This was the first mystery story S. S. Van Dine ever wrote. It is also the least interesting, an approach--none too assured--toward the method he developed in his later books. Paramount hack writers have made it better on the whole with the changes they introduce. Benson, who gets murdered, is a stockbroker. He has ruined several of his customers by selling them out in a market slump and each of the ruined traders has some other, private, reason for killing him. One evening they all meet at Benson's place in the country, where Detective Philo Vance is also a guest. Benson is killed and his murder later detected. William Powell, who has been Philo Vance twice before, plays him again with ease and conviction. Best shot:

Benson's corpse tumbling down the stairs.

Montana Moon (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Equipped with dull and naively vulgar dialog Montana Moon is a retake, admirably photographed, of the sort of picture that was known as a "superfeaturerl in the days when all pictures were westerns and when anything was a superfeature that contained more than a straight western story. The novelty is the introduction into ranch life of Joan Crawford, a girl addicted to the incautious pleasures and frail moral standards of the East. She marries a cowboy, "repents, is on her way back to New York when her train is held up by cowpunchers masquerading as bandits. Finding that the man with a black handkerchief over his face who carries her off is her husband, she experiences a change of heart. Composer Nacio Herb Brown has contributed songs that are chilly parlor phantoms of real cowboy melodies. Cliff Edwards does a little singing. Best shots: Miss Crawford's camel's hair coat, her jodhpurs.

Cock o' the Walk (Sono-Art). Only the most skillful playing could have given a credible air to this complicated and artificial story. It was written by Arturo Mom, motion picture reviewer of La Nation of Buenos Aires, who apparently compiled it by pasting up some of his old notices. He includes a jailbreak, an attempted suicide, a marriage triangle, a race-with-death in fast cars along a headland. The one real and potentially effective suggestion of the picture--the relations between an egotistic young musician and the waif he has married for commercial reasons--is spoiled by Joseph Schildkraut's familiar affectations, his habit of speaking lines of conversation as though he were reciting a Macaulay essay. Silliest shot: the champagne party in the local cabaret.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.