The New Pictures

Wee Willie Winkie (Twentieth Century-Fox) is the spectacular coming-of-age of a Kipling short story and Shirley Temple. The story, which originally concerned a boy at an Indian border station who got kidnapped by rebel hillmen and rescued the lieutenant's fiancee, has been rewritten to fit a girl and amplified into a big panel of adventure. It is the most expensive picture in which Shirley ever had a part.* It has enough action and well-built characterization to be a great picture without her. In the most exacting role of her astonishing career, Producer Darryl Zanuck has metamorphosed her from a collection of dimples into a selfconscious, capable child actress.

There was trouble at Rajpore, an army post on the Afghan border, when the widowed Mrs. William (June Lang) and her daughter Priscilla (Shirley Temple) got there. Tribal Chief Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero) had been arrested smuggling arms through the pass, and the hill people were coming down to get him back. Priscilla liked it in the station, where Sergeant MacDuff (Victor McLaglen) made her a wooden gun, taught her the manual of arms. She also learned not to go out in the sun without a hat, not to refer to the Colonel, her grandfather (C. Aubrey Smith), by his regimental nickname: Old Boots. One evening the Afghans attacked the arsenal to distract attention from a detail which got Khoda Khan out of the lockup. In the expedition sent to bring him back, Sergeant MacDuff, Priscilla's particular friend, who had named her Wee Willie Winkie. came by his death wound. Wee Willie Winkie thought she would call on Khoda Khan and tell him that Old Boots wanted to be friends. Her arrival pleased the Khan because it meant the regiment would follow through the pass to certain slaughter. When Old Boots ignored the volleys of the hillmen to stalk up alone for a confab, the Khan changed his mind about the slaughter. Wee Willie Winkie is a craftsman's picture which is also, surpassingly, an audience's picture. To able Associate Producer Gene Markey goes credit for seeing how the suggestions implicit in the Kipling fragment could be nursed into an epic; to able Director John Ford (The Informer), responsibility for the picture's pace, its sustained adventurous mood, its accumulation of memorable physical details; to Actors C. Aubrey Smith and Victor McLaglen the complete realization of two roles as great as any they ever played. Outstanding scenes: McLaglen getting washed for breakfast, drilling a squad, teaching boxing, playing dolls, dying in the infirmary; the attack on the arsenal; the Afghans laughing at Shirley; Old Boots going to Khoda Khan. The Emperor's Candlesticks (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is as blythe a pre-War romance as the Baroness Orczy, from whose book it was adapted, could wish. Rival spies, the Polish Baron Stephan Wolensky (William Powell) and the Russian Countess Olga Mironova (Luise Rainer), are entrusted with a pair of Louis XV candlesticks to be lugged from Vienna to St. Petersburg. In the secret compartment of one candlestick the Baron hides a message to the Tsar; in the other candlestick the Countess hides the Baron's death warrant. The candlesticks are filched en route, pawned at Budapest, shipped to Paris, auctioned in London. By the time the Countess and the Baron have caught up with the loot, they have fairly forsaken duty for love, for which they are promptly pardoned by the Tsar in person.

Easy Living (Paramount). When Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) is riding downtown on top of a Fifth Avenue bus, a sable coat lands on her head. Enraged because the feather in her hat is broken, she insists that J. B. Ball (Edward Arnold), who threw the coat out of his penthouse to enrage his wife, buy her a new hat. He does so. In her new finery, Mary Smith loses her job, makes friends with an amiable young automat waiter (Ray Milland) and, to her amazement, receives an offer of free lodging in a swank hotel, which she and the waiter accept. What Mary Smith does not know is that the young man is J. B. Ball's only son, rebelliously trying to make his own way in the world. What neither she nor the young man know is that Ball Sr. is the hotel owner's chief creditor and that she has been invited to live there because the proprietor of the hat shop (Franklin Pangborn) has spread the rumor that she is J. B. Ball's mistress. In Easy Living this situation serves under Mitchell Leisen's adroit direction as the framework for one of the season's silliest and most entertaining farces which reaches its climax when Mary Smith invades J. B. Ball's Broad Street office with three sheep dogs at the moment when he is trying to repair the damage caused by his son's incautious revelations to a market tipster. Good sequence: a riot in the automat when Ball Jr. tries to give Mary a free meal, turns on all faucets at once.

Knight Without Armor (London Films) exhibits Marlene Dietrich as an unkillable countess, escaping from Russia during the revolution with the aid of a British spy. When first seen, in 1913, Countess Alexandra (Dietrich) and A. J. Fotheringill (Robert Donat) are watching a horse race in England. She is the daughter of a Russian official. He is. a young traveler at home on vacation. They do not meet. By the time they encounter each other for the first time it is 1917. A. J., long imprisoned in Siberia for complicity in a Red plot, is now a member of the Red Army and Countess Alexandra is waiting to be shot.

Detailed to take the Countess to Petrograd, A. J.'s first gallant gesture is to free her near a White Army outpost. When the Red Army recaptures the post, A. J. returns for the Countess, spirits her away to a woodland dell. From the dell, the two set out for the border in a trainload of refugees. They are arrested again, handed over to an impressionable young Commissar for safekeeping. The young Commissar falls in love with the Countess, kills himself so she can escape. The Countess and A. J. board a river boat for the border and it looks as though their troubles are ove r until the Countess falls ill. At the border, the American Red Cross enters the proceedings as deus ex machina. Marlene is popped into a sickbed. A. J. dodges one more firing squad, boards her hospital train as it pulls away from Russia.

A curious but by no means uninteresting combination of Karl Marx and the Perils of Pauline, Knight Without Armor is an adaptation by famed Scenarist Frances Marion of James Hilton's novel, Without Armor. Directed by Jacques Feyder, set by Lazare Meerson, who also collaborated on La, Kermesse Heroique, produced by Alexander Korda, its principal virtue is magnificent direction and photography. Its principal weakness: a naive and repetitive narrative pattern in which its principals never assume the status of real human beings. Good shot: the Countess waking up in her country estate, ringing her bedside bell for the servants who are no longer there.

-* $1,100,000. Average cost of past Temple pictures: $300,000.

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