The New Pictures

The Howards of Virginia (Columbia-Frank Lloyd). Hollywood's sense of history is a bit erratic. Its preoccupation with the Civil War has left the impression that Abe Lincoln was the father of his country. The magnificent material to be found in America's small beginning has been almost entirely neglected since talking pictures arrived. Not until early this year, when veteran, British-born Director Frank Lloyd began shooting The Howards at Williamsburg, did any major director train his camera on the Founding Fathers. In The Howards of Virginia Director Lloyd presents their era in an able, slow-moving, sincere screen translation of Elizabeth Page's novel, The Tree of Liberty.

Director Lloyd, who performed a similar service for the British with his 1933 Oscar winner, Cavalcade, knows how to dish out history without resorting to textbook technique. He likes to take a few typical characters of the period, run them through the normal complications of normal people, silhouette them against a background of great dates, deeds, land marks. Thus he fashioned The Howards into a deft exposition of the forces which combined to create the U. S.

Matt Howard (Gary Grant) is a husky, handsome backwoodsman with a slight Scottish accent who woos and wins Jane Peyton (Martha Scott), a well-heeled Tory from Williamsburg, Va. Matt Howard takes his bride to the backwoods, where together they raise a family of three, build an inappropriately ornate house, try to reconcile their clashing view points. As a backwoods member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, Matt is fired by rabble-rousing Patrick Henry (Richard Gaines), and by the quiet logic of his good friend Thomas Jefferson (Richard Carlson). When war comes he marches off to battle, endures the black days of Valley Forge. Meanwhile Jane returns to the house of her Tory brother (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). The ending leaves Matt and Jane reconciled not so much by the bright future of peace as by the clearer understanding which peace will bring to their personal conflicts.

To play Jane Peyton, Director Lloyd chose Newcomer Martha Scott, whose only previous movie assignment was the naive New England schoolgirl in Our Town. The daughter of a Gee's Creek. Mo. electrical engineer, Martha's brief movie record belies her acting experience, which began in Kansas City at the age of "about twelve or so" when she took up public speaking and dramatics to overcome an inferiority complex. She went to the University of Michigan to study teaching, received an A.B. in 1934.

Late in 1937, Broadway Producer Jed Harris hired Martha to play Emily in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Two years later she was hired for the screen version of Our Town, moved directly from that to The Howards, ended up earning $500 a week. Martha once occupied a small Manhattan apartment with four other girls who selected their guests according to "the length of cigaret butts they would leave." She now lives in a small house with a pint-sized swimming pool in Beverly Hills, employs a man & wife to run her household, drives her Buick convertible coupe herself, dresses sloppily, avoids nightclubs. Frank Lloyd observed: "I haven't had an actress like Martha Scott since Pauline Frederick. They are damn few and far between."

Lucky Partners (RKO Radio) was meant to be two things: 1) what the movie trade papers call a "laff riot," and 2) a tender, touching little tale of a love-stung couple, poor but happy. That it is neither is due principally to a windy script and the mannered, stylized performances of the film's expensive stars.

When a flippant, chaste young girl (Ginger Rogers with dark-dyed hair) who works in a Greenwich Village bookshop meets a gallant, middle-aged painter (Ronald Colman) who lives across the street, She decides He brings her luck. Together they buy a sweepstakes ticket which produces $6,000, subsidizes a platonic junket to Niagara Falls before Ginger's marriage to a simple-minded insurance salesman. During the trip, the air is filled with unfounded suspicion and misunderstanding, leading to a courtroom-scene finale which attempts to recapture some of the humor of a somewhat similar sequence in My Favorite Wife.

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