The New Pictures

Don Quixote (Nelson Film, Ltd., Vandor Film). The wild mountain land above the French Riviera and Paris and London studios more than two years ago began to spawn rumors about this picture. French Novelist Paul Morand had written its scenario from the Cervantes classic. The producers had thrown out the musical jello which Composer Jules Massenet provided in his opera Don Quichotte, had commissioned new tunes from Jacques Ibert, able pupil of Maurice Ravel. George Wilhelm Pabst, exiled German Jew famed for his Kameradschaft, The Beggar's Opera and White Hell of Pitz Palu, was directing two versions, one in French, the other in English. In both versions Russian Basso Feodor Chaliapin was playing and singing the Caballero de la Triste Figura. He was getting $200,000. To look more like the lank old knight he had dieted and exercised to reduce his barrel figure. Spectators on location noted that the fastidious singer-actor Flitted daily the ribby old horse playing his steed Rosinante (TIME, Nov. 21, 1932).

Last week Don Quixote in English finally reached the U. S. Critics found it lively, visually beautiful, well acted by Chaliapin and a predominantly British cast including jovial old (65) George Robey, music-hall comedian. The pathos of the hero, however, choked off many a laugh at his comic doings.

First sound of the deep rackety bass of Chaliapin is when, in a cobwebby garret, the witling Don carols a Spanish song and puts on a battered suit of armor. He has driven his niece (Sidney Fox) and her ninny of a fiance to despair by selling all his possessions to buy a library of chivalric romances. He sallies forth, enters a tavern where strolling players are performing. Vastly amused, they dub him knight. He swears fealty to his Dulcinea --a tavern wench. Arousing his trusty Sancho Panza (Robey) from bed, the old knight drags him off on a career of errantry. Dreamy, hollow-eyed, grandiloquent, Don Quixote perpetually fancies he is dealing with giants or magicians. His bewildered but eager squire does his best to help and coddle the old zany. After the Don has attacked a flock of sheep the pair escape but when they incite a group of convicts to rebel, they not only get themselves badly stoned but end up in the hands of the local duke. This gentleman seeks to pacify the Don by humoring his delusions. The old Knight of the Mournful Countenance, however, detects a slight, wanders off once more to joust with windmills, returns home to find his books ablaze and to die. Photographed by Nicolas Farkas, who directed The Battle (TIME, Dec. 3), Don Quixote is at its best when it is purely pictorial--the brilliant whites and gloomy greys of Spain; the noble nose, the gaunt cheek, the scraggly whiskers of the Don whose addled pate wears a barber's lather-bowl which he thinks is a helmet; the whirling windmills seen from a dozen different angles after the poor Don is impaled on one of them by his own spear. Notable is the picture's end. Off-screen Chaliapin sings morosely, while the camera catches pattern after pattern in the twisting, writhing pages of his burning books. Here Is My Heart (Paramount). Cinemaddicts who remember that brilliant picture, The Grand Duchess and the Waiter, in which Adolphe Menjou performed in

1926, should be pleased to learn that this is a completely enjoyable version of the same story, ably revised to suit its leading actors. In civilized and airy fashion, it relates the efforts of an irresponsible radio crooner (Bing Crosby) to waste his first million dollars on fulfilling a childish ambition to marry a princess. When he meets the Princess (Kitty Carlisle) in Monte Carlo, it takes him no time at all to learn that she considers radio crooners at the bottom of the social scale. He buys the hotel in which she and her imprudent relatives are living on their dubious credit, impersonates a menial effectively enough to gain his ends.

To cinemaddicts who share the Princess' feeling about crooners, Here Is My Heart will reveal the fact that Bing Crosby is not only an accomplished singer but a talented comedian. Nonetheless, it is neither Crooner Crosby nor his songs ("Love Is Just Around the Corner," "It's June in January," "With Every Breath I Take") that make Here Is My Heart such agreeable entertainment. Aimed at intelligent audiences, written with wit, directed with a proper sense of style by Frank Tuttle, it has the immense advantage of having such performers as Roland Young, Alison Skipworth and Reginald Owen in subsidiary roles. As bedazzled, picayune Prince Nickolas, Young reveals, in urbane monosyllables, his scheme for crooked trading in used cars to replenish the empty royal treasury. When they learn that the hotel waiter has been seen stuffing bills into their wallets, the other members of the royal family are puzzled but Prince Nickolas is only pleased. "Don't say anything," he whispers, "he might stop."

Bright Eyes (Fox). When she appeared in Stand Up and Cheer which started her on her road to stardom, Shirley Temple weighed 42 Ib. Now she weighs 47 Ib. and is 11 in. taller. She arrives at the studio in a Dodge instead of a Ford. Her salary has gone up from $150 to $1,000 a week and Mrs. Temple is well paid for taking care of her daughter on the set. For amusement, Shirley wades in the ocean or plays with her two older brothers. Too young (5) to go to school, she studies dancing, takes lessons at her studio from the teacher appointed by the Los Angeles Board of Education to instruct child cinema actors. She has learned to read short words. Her friends are the same she had a year ago, the offspring of her parents' neighbors. Careful of their daughter's dignity, the Temples insist that at all benefit shows she must have "top billing." This does not indicate that Shirley Temple has acquired stage conceit; she does not applaud her own picture on the screen. She still believes in Santa Claus. Apparently unaware that if she needs toys she can well afford to buy them, she spent last week scribbling requests for an electric train with lots of tracks, a tub for washing dolls' clothes.

If there have been comparatively few improvements in Shirley Temple's private scale of living in the past year, there have been several in her work. Bright Eyes, in which she is starred, indicates clearly what effect one year can have upon the progress of a peewee. When she made her first important appearance in Stand Up and Cheer last April, Shirley Temple's main attractions were curls, a dimple, the ability to sing and tap dance. Since then she has become a seasoned, skillful actress, capable of reacting properly to all the stimuli normally experienced by the heroines of cinema. The story of Bright Eyes, following the rule for most pictures tailored to fit stars, is important only for the opportunities it gives Shirley Temple: to weep when she hears that her mother has gone to Heaven; to tiptoe away from her nursery when she learns that the couple she lives with do not like her; to chuckle when an aviator (James Dunn) who wants to adopt her lets her dress in his pajamas; to smile bravely when he makes a parachute jump with her in his arms; to look slyly good-humored when she is arranging the reconciliation between the aviator and his girl, which solves the question of her own future home. Shirley Temple handles all these opportunities with such childish grace and adult talent that when she returns to her old specialty in a song called "On the Good Ship Lollipop," it is almost as if Greta Garbo were suddenly to break into "Shuffle Off to Buffalo." Good shot : Shirley's mean playmate, brilliantly impersonated by 8-year-old Jane Withers, showing her the game of trainwreck. The Band Plays On (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Copiously seasoned with false sentiment and meretricious heroism, this dish of college, football & young love presents four young hoodlums turned from careers of crime by a kindly coach. As the "Four Bombers" they are supposed to be the greatest backfield in the U. S. The clowning of Leo Carrillo and Ted Healy. each of whom sets fire to the seat of the other's pants, does not save The Band Plays On from being worse than most of its kind. Silliest shot: Betty Furness telling her fiance, Robert Young, that he must continue college because as soon as he becomes a lawyer they will have plenty of money. The Mighty Barnum (Twentieth Century) introduces its hero (Wallace Beery) as the proprietor of a Manhattan general store, busily trading lightning rods for three-headed frogs while a friend has delirium tremens in Mrs. Barnum's bed. As soon as Bailey Walsh (Adolphe Menjou) is able to stand up, he and Barnum buy a livery stable with Mrs. Barnum's savings. There, with "George Washington's 169-year-old nurse" as their star attraction, they start The American Museum.

The nurse proves to be a fake but the museum prospers. Presently Barnum has a bigger one where General Tom Thumb does a minuet with his tiny wife. Bailey Walsh goes to purchase Jumbo from the London Zoo. When he returns with Jenny Lind (Virginia Bruce) instead, Barnum's troubles start. A Swedish masseur teaches him a toast. When he uses it at a banquet, Jenny Lind thinks he is trying to insult her. She scuttles back to Sweden, the neglected museum goes bankrupt, and Barnum is forlornly slouching on a park bench when his old friend General Thumb discovers him.

Tom Thumb rallies their old company of freaks and The American Museum is about to open again when a competitor sets fire to it. The disaster makes no difference because Bailey Walsh has succeeded in buying Jumbo and when The Mighty Barnum ends, the three of them are parading up Fifth Avenue with Barnum telling Bailey his idea for a circus.

When the script for this picture was published in book form (TIME, Dec. 24), reporters asked Author Gene Fowler if he had tried to follow history. Said he: "We tried to throw it out the window." Except that it truthfully portrays Phineas Taylor Barnum as a loud and ingenuous oddity. The Mighty Barnum succeeds admirably in its intention. A spirited mixture of legend, libel and exhilarating fiction, it is a first-rate cinema extravaganza which Barnum would have loudly applauded. Good shot: the sign in The American Museum--"This Way to the Egress." Sweet Adeline (Warner), taken from the musicomedy which played on Broadway five years ago, is a graceful if not particularly stirring sketch of Hoboken and Broadway at the time of the Spanish-American War. The Jerome Kern melodies ("Why Was I Born," "Don't Ever Leave Me") are its chief charm. With Helen Morgan, who created the role of Adeline Schmidt, under contract, Warner Brothers inexplicably gave the part to Irene Dunne, whom they had to borrow from another studio. Nonetheless, she and the other members of a cast which includes Hugh Herbert, Ned Sparks, Nydia Westman and Donald Woods, make Sweet Adeline an attractive and colorful if somewhat languorous entertainment. Good shot: Noah Berry, dressed up as a Sultan, rudely jostled by stage hands, carpenters, directors, actresses, as he imperturbably rehearses a song.

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