The New Pictures

Marie Antoinette (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Married at 14 to the fat grandson (Robert Morley) of Louis XV (John Barrymore), Marie Antoinette (Norma Shearer) is bored by court life, with a prince too sluggish to produce an heir. She takes to running about town with the sinister Duc d'Orleans (Joseph Schildkraut), a procedure which leads to a chance meeting with a young Swedish nobleman. Count Axel Fersen (Tyrone Power). Axel and Marie do not hit it off very well at first but a year or two later --just after Marie has made the King angry by calling Madame du Barry a streetwalker--they meet again, at the house of Count Mercy (Henry Stephenson). This time they settle down for a heart-to-heart chat, in the course of which, touching on the subject of museums. Axel enlarges on the reverence called forth by relics of the past. When Marie Antoinette says, "Do you think--one hundred years hence--some Swedish gentleman wandering in Paris may smile over a relic of Marie Antoinette's, a miniature perhaps, or a ring?" the count agrees politely.

Had Marie chanced instead to ask her friend whether he expected their romance to be celebrated by a cinema like the one in which this ironic little conversation occurs, any sensible young Swede, no matter how well-mannered, would certainly have answered no. Hollywood's tumbrils began rumbling five years ago, when an MGM story reader reported that Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette was "thoroughly modern, thoroughly plausible and slightly censorable." The picture was listed on the late Irving Thalberg's last production schedule, with his wife in the title role. The French Revolution, MGM, Shearer & Power, Director W. S. Van Dyke II and $2,500,000 are probably an unbeatable combination in any language. Even for Hollywood's most extravagant moments, the scale on which this picture was produced remains gargantuan. It is equipped with 5,500 extras and 98 grand-scale sets. It runs for two hours and 35 minutes. It also runs a gamut from babies to beheadings. The cast--particularly Miss Shearer and 28-year-old Robert Morley, whom Producer Hunt Stromberg discovered in London last year--extracts all its possibilities to the last drop of the guillotine.

In Marie Antoinette, MGM furnishes its fussiest star with her first role since Romeo and Juliet and maintains its position as the industry's supreme spendthrift. The picture presents French royalty as what it always has been for the cinema: a field day for dressmakers and writers of "O Sire" dialogue. The peak moment of Marie Antoinette occurs when Miss Shearer appears in a little number run up for her by MGM's famed Adrian, the skirt of which is held out by three-foot fenders on each side with two handles for its occupant to hold when turning corners.

Conversation between Marie and Axel is naturally only the beginning of the picture. There follow the death of Louis XV, the crowning of the new King, the birth of a Dauphin, Intermission, the revolution, a climactic chase on horseback and finally a protracted series of executions. By the time all these are over, historians may be inclined to cavil at Marie Antoinette for ignoring facts whenever convenient, but ordinary cinemaddicts will scarcely share their feelings. They are likely to guess instead that the picture is far superior to the revolution from which it was derived and that, if there are any disparities between them, they can be charged off to the fault of the latter, as the mishaps of a dress rehearsal.

Smashing the Rackets (RKO Radio) and Racket Busters (Warner Bros). Peak of evanescent fame for any U. S. celebrity is to become the hero of a movie. Last week, New York's energetic young District Attorney Thomas Edmund Dewey attained a new record when not one picture but a pair, based on his doings for the last three years, were released simultaneously. Smashing the Rackets adapted from a series of Saturday Evening Post articles by Forrest Davis, presents as its hero a sleek young lawyer who lacks the Dewey mustache but shares his model's antipathy for the white slave racket. Appointed special rackets prosecutor for New York, young Jim Conway (Chester Morris) rounds up a collection of streetwalkers, uses their testimony to send a big-shot racketeer to jail. Up to this point a reasonably authentic transcript from reality, Smashing the Rackets winds up in such a confusion of melodrama, involving another crook (Bruce Cabot), the prosecutor's fiancee (Frances Mercer) and her ill-behaved sister (Rita Johnson), that perceptive cinemaddicts will readily perceive why District Attorney Dewey threatened to sue the producers if his name were connected with the enterprise.

In Racket Busters, Mr. Dewey is represented by Special Prosecutor Allison (Walter Abel), whose facial resemblance to his original is as startling as the difference in their methods. Trying to break up a racketeer's trucking union, the best that Allison can do is to ask honest truckmen not to join. Truckmen who oblige him are intimidated, thrashed and pushed in front of subway trains. That the racketeers, headed by Humphrey Bogart, finally get routed is due less to Mr. Allison than to the foolhardy behavior of two young truckmen (George Brent and Allen Jenkins) who take matters into their own hands at the expense of breaking several traffic laws.

Main fault with the career of Mr. Dewey as material for cinema is that crusading district attorneys were a Hollywood stand-by long before he became one. Consequently, though Racket Busters and Smashing the Rackets are both reasonably good entertainment, both give the impression of being derived less from the headlines than from the studio library. Busy preparing his case against Tammany District Leader Jimmy Hines in New York last week, District Attorney Dewey attended neither.

Four's A Crowd (Warner Bros.) includes a trunkful of characters now fashionable in screen comedies: a madcap millionaire (Walter Connolly) with a passion for toy trains; his lovely granddaughter (Olivia de Havilland), so bored with mercenary suitors that she longs to meet a man who hates her; a livewire pressagent (Errol Flynn), who organizes a newspaper campaign to destroy the millionaire's good name, hoping thus to get hired to restore it; a dim-witted publisher (Patric Knowles) and his highly intelligent star reporter (Rosalind Russell), who are in love respectively with the heiress and the pressagent. Their antics--when the millionaire turns his great Danes loose on the pressagent, when the pressagent retaliates by buttering the tracks of the toy railroad, when a sleepy justice of the peace (Hugh Herbert), confusing the identities of the two young couples at their joint wedding, finally pronounces them "men and wives"--are in the best tradition of the cinema school established by My Man Godfrey and The Awful Truth.

Unfortunately, the resemblance between this picture and its classic predecessors is less real than apparent. In My Man Godfrey and The Awful Truth, humor bubbled from the contrast between the essential sanity of the people involved and the dangerous eccentricity of their behavior. Four's A Crowd, by presenting its people as fundamentally irresponsible, robs their irresponsibility of comic impact and turns what might have been high-tension comedy into mildly funny farce. Best shot: Errol Flynn, having hurriedly put an iron gate between himself and the great Danes, pausing to pull one of their tails between the bars, give it an emphatic bite.

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