The New Pictures

Elsa Maxwell's Hotel for Women (Twentieth Century-Fox) introduces two new screen personalities: luscious, lissom Linda Darnell (her real name), 15, of Dallas, Texas, and fat, frenetic, fiftyish Elsa Maxwell, corkjester extraordinary to Manhattan's cafe society. In a complicated little story about life & love in a Manhattan residence hotel for women, untypical Miss Maxwell plays herself (explaining her presence in the unswank Sherrington as her substitute for a vacation in the mountains), popping out brisk remarks, decanting an occasional drop of the Maxwellian philosophy, which undoubtedly seems headier after 2 a. m. On cocktail parties: "They're only given for people not good enough to be asked to dinner. And because of that they stay to dinner--and supper--and breakfast." On life, as passed on by her father: "Never ... be afraid, especially never ... be afraid of what THEY think, of what THEY say, because 'THEY' is nonexistent, a ghost in the mind. The world is more afraid of 'THEY' than of wars, plagues, and thunderstorms."

In Hollywood, fat Miss Maxwell stayed at the luxurious Beverly Hills house of thin Constance Bennett, was whisked from one bigwig's home to another in a green convertible automobile with white leather upholstery which had first been used for the California visit of the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark. Studio clippers excised a whole scene which she wrote, climaxed by a Maxwell song entitled Whistle a Little. Old Melody, to which two trained dogs did a dance. To augment her picture work, she made a string of lecture dates. Partygiver Maxwell gave no parties in Hollywood for other people (her onetime profession), only one on herself, in honor of her visiting friend, the Duchess of Westminster. Hollywood was satisfied when, at a preliminary dinner for 30 intimate friends, Hostess Maxwell put at each lady's plate a live duckling, harnessed in blue and white ribbon.

In Name Only (RKO Radio) will puzzle cinemagoers who thought they knew just what high jinks to expect when Screwball Gary Grant falls in love with Screwball Carole Lombard. Far from high jinks is the sombre situation of rich young Alec Walker (Mr. Grant) when he falls in love with Julie Eden (Miss Lombard), a widowed commercial artist who has taken a summer cottage near his stately country seat. For, as rarely happens in screwball comedy but is very likely to happen in life, Alec has a tenacious wife with an undeveloped sense of humor, parents who also thought infidelity no joke. Before Lovers Grant and Lombard fight through to the clear, they have traded more punches than puns, emerged with the realization that matrimony is more than the off-screen ending to a Grant-Lombard movie.

A mature, meaty picture, based on the novel Memory of Love, by veteran bucolic Bessie Breuer (wife of Muralist Henry Varnum Poor), In Name Only has its many knowing touches deftly underscored by Director John Cromwell, brought out by a smoothly functioning cast. No surprises are the easy ad-libbish styles of Stars Grant and Lombard, the enameled professional finish of oldtime Actor Charles Coburn as Alec's conventional father. Surprising to many cinemaddicts, however, will be the effectively venomous performance, as Alec's mercenary wife, of Cinemactress Kay Francis. Having worked out a long-term contract with Warner Bros, which kept her in the top money (over $5,000 a week) but buried her as the suffering woman in a string of B pictures, sleek Cinemactress Francis in her first free-lance job shows that she still belongs in the A's, that, properly encouraged, she can even pronounce the letter r without wobbling.

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