The New Pictures

Dark Victory (Warner Bros.-First National), if it were an automobile, would be a Rolls-Royce with a Brewster body and the very best trimmings. Though not up to Wuthering Heights (TIME, April 17), it is one of the best star vehicles Hollywood has produced this year. As a play, it was not a success when Tallulah Bankhead took it to Broadway four years ago. Refashioned by Screenwriter Casey Robinson to fit Bette Davis, Warners' most talented and ambitious star, it gives her a chance to do a good job and puts her well up in line for her third Academy Award.

As Judith Traherne, Bette Davis is a horsy Long Island heiress with a stable of steeplechasers and a tongue like a riding crop, which she and her friends blame on her unusually severe hangovers. She discovers, from a personable young brain surgeon (George Brent), that her headaches have a more serious cause. The surgeon knows that every day brings her closer to death. Before death comes, on a sunny day at his Vermont farm, Judith knows too, but is convinced that the victory has been hers.

Though this plot gives the film an unfair advantage over sentimental audiences, and Actress Davis plucks every heartstring she can lay a finger on, under Edmund Goulding's delicate, direction she makes Dark Victory moving but not morbid. The picture allows pretty, able newcomer Geraldine Fitzgerald (Wuthering Heights) to put a shapely foot forward, gives Humphrey Bogart, as an Irish groom who loves Judith for her breeding, a chance to act without a gun up his sleeve. Memorable sequence: Judith trying to put her horse over a jump on a morning when her hangover is worse than usual.

Back Door to Heaven (Odessco Productions, Paramount release) is an awkward attempt to crash the back door of the cinema industry. It is notable as the first effort of a new producing company headed by Bernard Steele and Stanley Odium (son of Investment Truster Floyd Bostwick Odium, whose Atlas Corp. has a large stake in Radio-Keith-Orpheum and who reportedly put up part of the $350,000 it cost to make the picture in Astoria, L. I.).

Gray, unaccented, often pointless, Back Door to Heaven shows the progress of dim-witted Frankie Rogers (Wallace Ford) from the wrong side of the tracks to the wrong side of the bars. Largely a one-man job, the picture owes its sincerity and its faults to husky, sentimental Director

William K. Howard (Fire Over England). Director Howard (on a profit-sharing basis) wrote the original story, produced and directed Back Door to Heaven, laid it in his home town of St. Mary's, Ohio, at the last moment smeared himself with grease and enacted the part of the prosecuting attorney who sends Frankie to the chair. Such versatility caused Director Howard's friends at Manhattan's Stork Club, whose major-domo Jack Entratter got a policeman's part in the picture, to refer to him as "Noel Howard." Back Door to Heaven being what it is, this crack was no compliment to England's Noel Coward.

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