The New Pictures

The Great Man Votes (RKO Radio). Latest and youngest addition to the long roster of Hollywood "geniuses" is Director Garson Kanin, whose specialty is making silk purses out of sows' ears. A onetime Broadway actor and assistant to Broadway Producer George Abbott, Director Kanin started his cinema career as an odd-job man for Sam Goldwyn in 1937, when he was 24. Last year RKO somewhat skeptically allowed him to direct a B-picture called A Man to Remember, which was equipped with a no-star cast and budgeted for a mere $119,000. Kanin turned it into an excellent picture, followed it up with a good job on Next Time I Marry, produced for $126,000.

For The Great Man Votes he was given $200,000, John Barrymore and Peter Holden. A superproduction in comparison with Kanin's earlier efforts, it is still a quickie according to normal Hollywood standards. Director Kanin, in his accustomed style, makes capital of its entertainment assets far beyond its cost.

Central figure of The Great Man Votes is a broken-down Harvard professor who, at the death of his wife, gives way to drink and inertia. An accident of ward politics makes this picturesque bum of crucial importance in a municipal election. How this situation affects him and his lively little son and daughter is revealed by Director Kanin with a maximum of warm, perceptive humor, a decent minimum of emotional climaxes.

Most actors hate working with child prodigies, who usually lack adult scruples about stealing scenes. John Barrymore is no exception to this rule, but he is one of the few actors who are capable of taking an eye for an eye against any baby star in pictures. Not the least remarkable of Director Kanin's achievements in The Great Man Votes was keeping this competition between Barrymore and Holden almost invisible on the screen. Good shot: Barrymore stealing a scene when he is supposed to be asleep.

Jesse James (Twentieth Century-Fox). From 1901 to 1903, 121 "dime novels" (price, 5-c-) about Jesse Woodson James were published by Street & Smith, sold about 6,000,000 copies. Last week, to coincide with the release of the $2,000,000 cinema epic, the original publishers reprinted No. 1 of the series, Jesse James, the Outlaw.

In Jesse James, the Outlaw and its sequels, Missouri's famed train robber was portrayed as a morally delinquent crook. Producer Darryl Zanuck naturally takes a kinder view of Jesse's failings. Purified in the person of Tyrone Power, Jesse James emerges brilliantly in Technicolor as an amiable brigand, genuinely devoted to his aged mother and generally more sinned against than sinning.

Although their desire to annoy the skinflint president of the St. Louis Midland Railroad is altruistic, Jesse and his brother Frank (Henry Fonda) rob his trains with ingratiating gusto. No mollycoddle, Jesse James excels modern cinema gangsters in horseback riding, marksmanship and chivalry. He treats his gun-moll (Nancy Kelly) with devotion, and is shot by a traitor while fondly regarding a hand-embroidered wall motto that says God Bless Our Home.

In trying to make Jesse James atmospherically authentic, Director Henry King spared no expense. When he learned that the courthouse in Liberty, Mo., real home of the James boys, had been torn down, he flew over the Ozarks looking for a village where an old courthouse was still standing. Spying one at Pineville, he built oldtime false fronts over its modern stores, covered its concrete streets with dirt, hired dozens of its citizens as extras.

Cinema tributes to historical celebrities are often ungratefully received. Last November, descendants of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had 17 children, growled because Suez failed to show that their progenitor had married. Last week, after a Hollywood preview of Jesse James, Miss Jo Frances James, not a bank robber but a Los Angeles bank executive, said: "About the only connection it had with fact was that there was once a man named James and he did ride a horse."

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