The New Pictures

David Harum (Fox) offers admirers of Will Rogers an opportunity to watch him whittling a fence-post, driving a sulky, singing ta-rah-rah-rah-boom-de-aye and swindling a clergyman. David Harum is a New England horse-trader and village banker. Part rascal, part philanthropist, he makes it his business to further a romance between his shy clerk (Kent Taylor) and his pretty protege (Evelyn Venable). He accomplishes his purpose by trading to her a horse named Cupid, suitable for sentimental buggy rides because he balks.

This deal and the trotting race at the end constitute all the dramatic action in David Harum. Walter Woods's adaptation of Edward Noyes Westcott's famed novel is therefore in the nature of a Rogers column, illustrated with lantern slides. Sample slide: Rogers smoking, for the first time, a pipe filled not with tobacco but with an asthma cure. Groom to Cupid is a shiftless, unintelligible blackamoor named Sylvester (Stepin Fetchit). He dozes helplessly through the picture, whining a language of his own. When Cupid shivers after a rubdown, Sylvester puts a blanket on Will Rogers.

As eloquent as the silence of Harpo Marx is the unintelligibility of Stepin Fetchit, who is too lazy to use words. Born Lincoln Perry in Key West, Fla., in 1902, Stepin Fetchit went to divinity school. When after two years he learned that it would take two more to finish the course, he resigned. Discharged for incompetence as a racetrack tout, he adopted the name of his favorite horse (Step and Fetch It) and decided to try acting.

In 1929 Stepin Fetchit was a successful Hollywood comedian (Show Boat, Hearts in Dixie, Fox Follies). He made $1,000 a week, owned four Cadillac cars with a chauffeur for each, spent $75 telephoning his mother to ask whether to buy his sister a $36 dress, urged producers to cast him as Othello. Annoyed by rumors that he was as lazy off the screen as on, he grew over-diligent, insisted on writing his own lines, directing his own scenes. In 1931, Stepin Fetchit ceased to be employed in Hollywood. Last autumn Winfield Sheehan of Fox was smart enough to rehire him. In Carolina he appeared as the stumbling, fumbling "cornfield nigger" dressed up as a butler. He will next appear in Fox Follies of 1934.

The Ninth Guest (Columbia). The luxurious penthouse in this picture is even more sinister than most attic apartments in the cinema. Upon their arrival the guests (a college president, an instructor whom he has discharged, a politician, a banker, a journalist and assorted women) cannot find their host. Presently a voice in the radio informs them that the doors are charged with death-dealing electricity, that there are cocktails in the kitchen and poison on the mantelpiece, that they will all be lucky to get out alive. The oldest woman present commits suicide when the radio denounces her as a social parvenu. The banker kills himself by accident while trying to poison the rest of the company. Curiosity and alarm set others to bickering and snarling. They drop off one by one, leaving only the journalist (Donald Cook) and his inamorata (Genevieve Tobin).

A fancy advertisement for the excitements of metropolitan nightlife. The Ninth Guest is civilized scarecrow drama, handsome, improbable and exciting. Worst shot: a butler fumbling with a block of ice to provide comic relief.

Journal of a Crime (Warner). A jealous wife (Ruth Chatterton) shoots her husband's mistress. Thereafter, the husband (Adolphe Menjou) fixes her with a bilious eye, waiting for her to confess. When this happens, she goes mad and he feels sorry. When last seen the couple are on a terrace above the Mediterranean, he a misanthrope and she a crackpot, brooding harmlessly in deckchairs.

Like other recent Chatterton pictures, Journal of a Crime indicates that stolen property is often difficult to sell. Ever since Warner Brothers took Ruth Chatterton from Paramount in 1931, they have found her a serious problem. A solemn, intelligent actress with searching eyes and plaintive voice, she lacks the qualifications for the rapidfire melodrama or the garish musicomedy which are now Warner specialties. Pictures like Journal of a Crime suit Ruth Chatterton better than they suit the tastes of audiences.

Spitfire (RKO), completed before Katharine Hepburn left Hollywood for her Manhattan stage appearance in The Lake, is an unsatisfactory sequel to Little Women. It exhibits her as a West Virginia cabin waif named Trigger, part tomboy and part prophetess. She has a pack of Sunday School cards. Her implicit faith in their texts not only enables her, amid blubbering prayers, to heal her neighbors with hookworm, but also causes her beneficiaries to regard her as a witch. When not engaged in faith-healing, little Trigger throws stones at her acquaintances, abuses an idiot girl friend, steals a sick baby, falls in love successively with two construction engineers.

The Hepburn characterization of Trigger as a queer, hot-tempered warmhearted hoyden is wasted on the picture. In mood and manner Spitfire belongs to an obsolete era in the cinema. Typical shot: Trigger describing a lout who has tried to kiss her as "consared Son of Satan."

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