The New Pictures

The Key (Warner). Ireland, in the cinema, is usually represented by 1) "Wearing of the Green" played by bagpipes; or 2) Marion Davies saying "acushla." The Key is, therefore, an Irish experiment. Adapted from the London play by R. Gore Brown and J. L. Hardy, with an imported cast including J. M. Kerrigan, once of the Abbey Players, it tries hard to use the Dublin riots of 1920 as authentic background for a semi-serious melodrama.

Captain Andrew Kerr (Colin Clive) is a British officer stationed at Dublin. His friend Captain Tennant (William Powell), who has had an affair with Mrs. Kerr (Edna Best) before her marriage, attempts to revive it when they meet again. Captain Kerr finds out about this the evening he gets back from capturing Sinn Fein Leader Pedar Conlan. Dejected, he stumps out of his house and into a Sinn Fein ambush which enables Tennant to make a handsome gesture. He forges an order for the release of Conlan, obtains the release of Captain Kerr in exchange, lights a cigaret as he gets into a lorry to go to jail for three years.

The obvious fault in The Key as occasional drama is that the incidents which it relates could have occurred just as well in Nicaragua or Cincinnati. Nonetheless, Dublin decorations do not damage a good melodrama. The Key is well constructed and acted with proper enthusiasm. Under Director Michael Curtiz, who took pains to get all the possible wear out of his sets, Edna Best does a commendable job in her first important cinema role. Good shot: a genial Irish bartender advising Captain Kerr to leave by the back door where he knows an ambush is in wait.

Little Man, What Now (Universal). Hans Pinneberg (Douglass Montgomery) is a bookkeeper in the German town of Ducherow, worried about losing his job and the pregnancy of his sweetheart Lammchen (Margaret Sulla van). Marriage solves one problem and augments the other. Pinneberg's employer has been planning to marry his hireling to his daughter; when he learns his clerk has already taken a wife, he discharges Pinneberg. Lammchen and her husband go to Berlin to live with Pinneberg's hard-boiled mother whose friend Jachman helps the young man get a job selling clothes in a department store. Lammchen is content to cook for Frau Pinneberg's noisy visitors but young Pinneberg feels ashamed when he finds that he is being pensioned by his mother's pimp. Presently the two young Pinnebergs are established in an attic over a stable. By the time Pinneberg has lost his job in the store and been manhandled by police in a political riot, he goes home to find that he has finally acquired a son, for whom there seems to be as little room in the world as for his father.

At this point Director Frank Borzage really ended his treatment of Little Man, What Now. In a final, purely conventional, sequence, one of Pinneberg's friends is heard thumping up the ladder to the attic to announce that he has found Pinneberg a good job in Amsterdam.

When Universal bought the picture rights to Hans Fallada's moving novel, Variety suggested a cinema version entitled: "Little Man, So What?" Little Man, What Now is not one of Director Borzage's best pictures but it has the qualities of intelligence, honesty and observance which are indelibly part of his style. Douglass Montgomery gives a quiet, unmannered and understanding performance. Margaret Sullavan, whose brilliant acting in Only Yesterday made her Hollywood's brightest prospect since Katherine Hepburn, makes Little Man, What Now her picture. Good shot: Lammchen conversing with Hans while riding on a merry-go-round, one sentence with each circuit.

Margaret Sullavan got her role in Only Yesterday because Director John Stahl supposed that if a better known actress took the part of the deserted sweetheart, cinemaddicts would have difficulty in believing that a hero could so easily forget her. She liked her work in that picture so little that she refused to see it, finally sent her colored maid Lisbeth to investigate. Lisbeth reported the picture was wonderful and had made her cry. Said Margaret Sullavan: "Now I know it must be terrible." When the late Lilyan Tashman congratulated her, Margaret Sullavan thanked her curtly. Said Cinemactress Tashman: "Someone should teach that girl some manners." If Margaret Sullavan lacks manners, it is not the fault of her upbringing. She was born in Norfolk, Va. in 1909, sent to Chatham Episcopal Institute where she played her first role in the commencement play, and to Sullins College. Her father gave her permission to study dancing for a year. She went to Boston, switched from dancing to the theatre, played juvenile leads in Cape Cod stock companies. When she first went to Hollywood, she had had more stage experience than Katherine Hepburn : a year in Elmer Harris's The Modern Virgin, a season on the road in Strictly Dishonorable, the ingenue role in Dinner at Eight for two months.

In Hollywood, Miss Sullavan follows the current fashion for shyness. She keeps an official residence with a secretary to answer telephone calls, lives in a small house with Lisbeth, uses no makeup, dresses in moccasins, old sweater & trousers. She swims 30 times up & down her pool every morning, 30 more times every evening, attends no Hollywood parties even when they are given by Universal's Carl Laemmle Jr. Stubborn about her own affairs, she replies to studio requests to have a crooked tooth in the left side of her mouth straightened by saying she prefers it crooked. Studio officials last autumn persuaded her to have a mole on the left side of her face removed. She disappeared for four days until the mole had completely vanished. In 1931, while she was acting at West Falmouth, Mass., she married a member of the company named Henry Fonda, now appearing in Manhattan in New Faces. They were divorced last winter. She makes $1,200 a week, banks $1,000, likes to cook chicken livers and sweetbreads, enjoys fishing and is agreeable to hooking her own worms. Her next picture will be The Good Fairy, from Ferenc Molnar's play.

Born to Be Bad (Twentieth Century). Organizations like the Motion Picture Research Council consider the cinema a bad influence on children. Minors would be justified in considering a picture like Born to Be Bad dangerous for their parents. It suggests that the most successful way to rear a brat is to teach him to lie, cheat, steal and break out of reform school. Such tricks, practiced in this picture by young Mickey Strong (Jackie Kelk), finally bring him to live in a country manor house equipped with an outdoor swimming pool, a kindhearted butler and rich foster-parents.

Born to Be Bad, written and directed by Ralph Graves and Lowell Sherman, is really less convincing as an advertisement for juvenile delinquency than as a fashion parade for Loretta Young, who appears as Mickey Strong's mother. When Malcolm Trevor (Gary Grant), president of a milk company driving his own truck, runs into Mickey, she attempts to extort money from him by pretending that Mickey's injuries are more serious than they are. Mickey goes to the reform school. His mother persuades Malcolm Trevor to take him out, then attempts to seduce Malcolm Trevor and blackmail him into giving Mickey back to her. When she falls in love with Trevor, she regrets these actions and departs," leaving Mickey in residence at Trevor Manor, expecting a pony.

This picture resembles its most interesting character--a small, tricky, dishonest ragamuffin cinema. Typical shot: Mickey's mother calling him a sissy because he wears a bathing suit in swimming.

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