The New Pictures

Wings of the Morning (New World). Made in England, first directorial job of a onetime Fox cutter, named Harold Schuster, Wings of the Morning appears by liberal analysis to be a technicolor romance about the Epsom Derby. It takes a very liberal analysis to boil down the impudent, abstracted charm of the picture into this or any other trade category. Wings of the Morning glows with the kind of imagery which used to absorb the late Donn Byrne, upon some of whose stories it is based. Its tinted surfaces are vivid with gypsies, Irish hunters, girls in boys' clothing and effective landscape shots. Its structure, like that of the Byrne stories, is subject to interpolation every time a colorful episode, not included in the original scheme, seems possible.

A handsome horse was what Lord Clontarf (Leslie Banks) saw first in the gypsy camp, but Marie (Annabella) blushed because she thought his comment, ''What a beauty!" was inspired by her. Later the Lord's reaction was more nearly what she wanted: when some highborn ladies snubbed her at a dinner party, Clontarf married her. The ill fate that brought him his death in the hunting field five months later banished Marie from his land. Gypsy lore indicated that in four generations, when "the blood was cleansed" she might return. Back in Ireland after fleeing from the Spanish Revolution, Marie's granddaughter Marie (Annabella, this time a blonde) tumbles off Wings of the Morning, her grand mother's Derby candidate, into the life of Kerry (Henry Fonda). When Kerry swaps Marie six nags for Wings of the Morning, the gypsies make her go and beg her bargain back. What makes the scene confusing for Marie is that she still has on trousers, and that Kerry is bathing in a small tin tub; Sex, however, is established on its conventional lines by the time Kerry's Destiny Bay runs against Marie's Wings in the Derby. Her Spanish fiance, Diego (Teddy Underdown), has claimed her and she would have married him if he had not renounced her when it seemed that Wings was going to be disqualified, leaving her dowerless. When she finds Kerry he is once more taking a bath, this time in an Irish stream. But now Marie does not mind. As a bonus with the first color picture produced in England, Producer Robert T. Kane has tossed in some songs by John McCormack, given famed Derby Jockey Steve Donoghue, six times winner of the Epsom Derby (1915-17-21-22-23-25), the leg-up on. Wings.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles (London Films). When, for his own amusement, one of the god-like creatures who inhabit the firmament of Author H. G. Wells decides to endow a single mortal with the power to work miracles, his choice by pure chance lights upon George McWhirter Fotheringay (Roland Young). No one is more surprised than Mr. Fotheringay at what consequently happens when, in the course of a public house argument about metaphysics, he orders the chandelier to turn upside down. The chandelier does so. When Mr. Fotheringay lacks presence of mind to order it back into place, it falls on the floor and breaks. Thrown out of the saloon for conduct unbecoming to a gentleman, Mr. Fotheringay goes home to experiment with his new found knack. He conjures rabbits, kittens, gold watches and finally a bunch of grapes which he nibbles contentedly before he falls asleep.

Given the power to work miracles, what are the best miracles to work? As the days go by, this problem becomes increasingly bothersome to Mr. Fotheringay. In the drygoods store where he clerks, it is easy enough for him to tidy up his department by ordering goods back onto the shelves. He can also furnish the prettiest girl in the shop with a diamond tiara and a costume like Cleopatra's, but investigation proves that his power falls short of making her fall in love with him. Mr. Fotheringay's employer wants him to use his ability to speed up retail deliveries. An idealistic curate suggests humanitarian schemes. Impatient with trifles, the miracle worker creates a gigantic palace, fills it with important people, dresses himself in the costume of a medieval king and announces that he wants the-world run better. When his audience is slow about obeying, he orders the earth to stop going around. The result of this command is so shocking to Mr. Fotheringay that it is all he can do to tell it to go on again. By this time, he is a little weary of omnipotence. His last miracle is to deprive himself of it, turn time back to where it was when the whole thing started.

In Producer Alexander Korda's new and fabulously well-appointed studio at Denham, England, two of the most valuable items of equipment are 70-year-old Author H. G. Wells (see p. 69), now fairly launched on a new career as a screenwriter, and a 43-year-old "special effects" expert named Ned Mann, whose ability to work miracles with fake backgrounds and trick shots is even more indispensable to this picture than it was to the former Wells-Korda opus, Things to Come. Wells, Mann and mousey Actor Roland Young, who is ideally suited to his role, make The Man Who Could Work Miracles an enormously engaging combination of farce, fantasy and philosophy. Good shot: A puffy retired colonel (Ralph Richardson) tasting a highball from which, as a favor to the curate, Mr. Fotheringay has miraculously removed the whiskey.

The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). "Sherry! Champagne would be ideal, but sherry will do." This airy comment by Lord Dilling (Robert Montgomery) as he unstops a decanter in the boudoir of Fay Cheyney (Joan Crawford) serves neatly to disguise his surprise at the discovery, made a moment before, that she is a burglar. It also serves as a compact description of the picture, adapted from Frederick Lonsdale's play which Ina Claire played on the stage in 1925 and Norma Shearer on the screen in 1929. In The Last of Mrs. Cheyney the action takes place in those British drawing rooms and country houses whose fabulous elegance has become as much a tradition of the modern theatre as its footlights. The acting required for this kind of comedy, as stylized and polished as that of Chinese tragedy, is not precisely the brand at which Montgomery, Crawford et al. are specialists. Nonetheless, if The Last of Mrs. Cheyney lacks the effervescence it had when Ina Claire played it on the stage, the screen play, by Leon Gordon, Samson Raphaelson and Monckton Hoffe, retains the pleasantly dry flavor of Author Lonsdale's wit. Smooth direction by the late Richard Boleslawski, who died just before shooting was completed, and lavish production by Lawrence Weingarten, MGM's heir apparent to the late Irving Thalberg, makes it one of the most refreshing comedies of the season.

Picked out of a 5-c--&-10-c- store by a suave gentleman crook (William Powell), Fay Cheyney is willing to undertake stealing a pearl necklace from a Duchess until the ease with which she fits into the duchess' social circle makes her mission seem both humiliating and unnecessary. Lord Kelton (Frank Morgan), the richest peer in England, as well as young Lord Billing have proposed to her on the evening when, out of well-bred loyalty to her accomplices, she cracks the duchess' safe. When Lord Billing surprises her in the act of handing over her booty to her partner, Fay Cheyney rings the burglar alarm herself. The chance that her hostess will allow her to go to jail is removed next morning when Lord Kelton reveals that, in his anxiety to warn an innocent young girl about the people she will meet in polite society, he has written Fay an outspoken letter about the other guests at the duchess' house party. Fay's gesture of tearing up the letter instead of using it for blackmail sharpens Author Lonsdale's point of showing that the British aristocracy could take lessons in morals from a sneak-thief. Good shot: William Powell--who hates sentiment and usually refuses to give it histrionic expression--saying farewell to Joan Crawford with tears in his eyes and a catch in his voice, both caused by the fact that he had a bad case of laryngitis when the scene was shot.

When You're in Love (Columbia). The ingenuity with which Hollywood scenarists arrange opportunities for the heroines of musical comedies to perform their function of singing is matched only by the lack of ingenuity with which they observe the tradition that all musical comedy heroines must be singers by profession. Now Grace Moore, as an Australian diva named Louise Fuller, yodels a Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song called The Whistling Boy when a crowd of urchins follows her into a rehearsal hall. When her husband (Gary Grant), whom she has acquired as a convenient way of complying with U. S. immigration quota laws, is trying to persuade her to stop regarding their union as a marriage of convenience, it is the cue for her to render something called Our Song in a forest whose birds stop twittering to listen. At her husband's country lodge, complying with the new convention whereby Metropolitan Opera stars show cinema patrons how jolly and unpretentious they really are by breaking into jazz, Miss Moore rivals the recent efforts of Lily Pons and Gladys Swarthout by moaning an expurgated version of "Minnie the Moocher" while attired in a flannel shirt and trousers. This is the comic climax of the picture. It is followed by the formal climax in which, at a song festival in which she is appearing as a gesture of loyalty to an orchestra conductor (Henry Stephenson). Miss Moore favors the sound track with Schubert's Serenade.

The picture marks the debut of Robert Riskin, long famed as the screenwriting teammate of Director Frank Capra, as a director as well as author. Following the pattern of It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, in which Director Capra established Clark Gable and Gary Cooper as comedians, Director Riskin herein does the same thing for Gary Grant. Good shot: Miss Moore, who shows signs of becoming a skillful comedienne, proposing to Grant in a Mexican jail.

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