The New Pictures

The Rains Came (20th Century-Fox) suggests that, unless Producer Darryl Francis Zanuck abates his enthusiasm for bigger & better cinema catastrophes, the upshot may well have to be an autobiography culminating in the destruction by brimstone of the 20th Century-Fox studios. Life in the native Indian state of Ranchipur is going on placidly until the rains come. Then a San Francisco earthquake breaks the dam at the most inopportune moment, inundating Ranchipur in a flood more terrible, if less widespread, than that of The Green Pastures. A plague of Yellow Jack virulence breaks out, inducing the Ranchipur authorities to start a fire that burns as brightly as did the conflagration in In Old Chicago. Most cinemaddicts will wonder why, having carried this chain of horror so far, Producer Zanuck failed to find a pretext to recall The Hurricane.

As entertainment, The Rains Came suffers from the fact that it uses its salvo of disasters not to solve the problems of its characters, but to heighten them. Since these characters to begin with are as slick and typical a pack as ever cavorted through a Louis Bromfield serial in Cosmopolitan, after the rain they seem sadly washed out and anticlimactic. Chief among them are Tom Ransome (George Brent), a remittance man from a good county family, his old flame Lady Edwina Esketh (Myrna Loy), who deserted him to find a rich husband, and Major Safti (Tyrone Power), the handsome, high-caste Indian surgeon for whom Lady Esketh wickedly sets her cap. While trying to keep his friend Safti out of Lady Esketh's clutches, Ransome has his hands full with a stage-struck missionary's daughter, Fern Simon (Brenda Joyce). To Ransome the rains bring strength, to Major Safti responsibility, to Lady Esketh romance and repentance.

After selling his 1937 best-seller for $55,000, Author Bromfield, no lover of Hollywood, returned to his expatriate retreat outside Paris, thence prankishly dispatched identical telegrams to Constance Bennett, Kay Francis and Marlene Dietrich, informing each that she was his choice for the sought-after part of Lady Esketh. Harried Producer Zanuck got no peace until he solved the mystery, passed the telegrams around. The only memorable performance in The Rains Came is that of button-faced, button-sized Russian veteran Maria Ouspenskaya. Cast as Charles Boyer's grandmother in one scene in Love Affair this year, Actress Ouspenskaya stole the picture. As the barefooted but regal Maharani of The Rains Came, she does it again.

Golden Boy (Columbia) is not the first prize-fighter picture whose hero fails to win the championship, but it is the first to portray a fighter as a pitiable neurotic. Joe Bonaparte (William Holden) has a beautiful pair of hands, which he can use to equal effect playing the violin or smashing a face. The violin seems likely to win out with thoughtful Joe until Manager Tom Moody (Adolphe Menjou), threatened with the loss of a promising meal ticket, gets his girl, Lorna Moon (Barbara Stanwyck), to stiffen Joe's spine. In Clifford Odets' play, Joe never got much out of his fighting hands but a shiny roadster that he piled up against a tree. In the cinema Joe fares better.

Lacking the gutty foreignness that flavored the Odets play and disguised the too-literal symbolism of its situation, Golden Boy is saved from sinking into a slow-moving dialect melodrama chiefly by the freshness of its new male star. Curly-topped, ingenuous-looking Actor Holden was picked from Paramount's roster by Director Rouben Mamoulian, who, after testing hundreds of candidates for the Golden Boy role, chanced to see Holden in a screen test for another picture. Most surprising fact uncovered by Columbia's publicity department about Actor Holden, born William Franklin Beedle Jr. 20 years ago in O'Fallon, Ill., is that he claims kinship both to George Washington and Warren Gamaliel Harding.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.