The New Pictures

Room Service (RKO) is John Murray's and Allen Boretz's outrageously funny farce about the exigencies of show business on a shoe string, redesigned as a vehicle for Harpo, Groucho and Chico Marx. Groucho is Producer Gordon Miller, whose schemes for wheedling board & lodging out of a weak-spined hotel manager to whom he already owes a small fortune are hideously complicated by the arrival of an irascible hotel supervisor (Donald McBride), then of the bewildered young author whose play he hopes to produce. Harpo and Chico are Miller's equally impecunious assistants. The tumultuous efforts of the Marxes along two fronts--1) forestalling the supervisor's efforts to throw them out, and 2) bullying a naive financial agent into signing a check that will solve all their difficulties --lead to scenes of indescribable confusion. The double room which Groucho stubbornly regards as his castle becomes a shambles on which the most effective comment is entirely wordless: when Harpo undertakes to relieve his partner's hunger pangs by bringing in a live turkey he has won at a raffle, the turkey takes one look at its surroundings and flies out of the window.

Room Service, in its screen version, is open to criticism on one point. The Marxes have been playing as themselves too long to hope that the public will ever accept them as characters in somebody else's story. Captious critics may find that the resultant absence of illusion in Room Service impairs its hilarity. Loyal Marxists will find it well up to the standard of such predecessors as A Night at the Opera or A Day at The Races. Good shot: Harpo's happiness when the turkey, apparently gone for good, returns to roost nervously on a window ledge.

Straight, Place and Show (Twentieth Century-Fox) exhibits the Ritz Brothers up to their customary tricks: jabbering at each other in unintelligible shouts or whispers, making faces, screeching into telephones, executing Russian dances in cowboy costumes, worrying, ringing bells, riding horseback forward and backward, crawling on all fours and swinging from the limbs of trees. Naturally, in a picture which contains the Ritzes, there is very little room left for a story. In Straight, Place and Show, Damon Runyon's and Irving Caesar's fairly conventional fable about a young man (Richard Arlen), a young girl (Phyllis Brooks) and an eccentric race horse survives principally as the excuse for two songs by Ethel Merman and a steeplechase climax which, faintly reminiscent of The Hottentot (1920), is one of the most suspenseful and certainly one of the funniest cinema sequences ever filmed at famed Santa Anita track. Typical shot: Ritz No. 3 turning off the lights during a wrestling match so that Ritz No. 2 can hit Ritz No. 1's opponent with the timekeeper's hammer.

If I Were King (Paramount). To a guileless cinemaddict the task of making Frangois Villon dull and respectable might appear Herculean. In If I Were King, Director Frank Lloyd and Writer Preston Sturges, no doubt aided by the Hays censorship, perform it in their stride. Since there is nothing spectacularly bad about If I Were King, it will doubtless appear on every list of worthwhile films compiled by every self-appointed reviewing board in the U. S. But its makers have found not one fresh point of view, have included every available cliche of sword-&-cloak romance, plus the cliche of modern fiction, social significance. Result: so wooden that even the clashing of swords suggests a xylophone.

By far the best thing in If I Were King is Basil Rathbone's acidulous portrayal of Louis XI as an unstable, peevish, medieval neurotic. The picture generally omits the few known facts of Villon's desperate, dog-eared life in favor of an elaborate fiction wherein he wins a war against the Duke of Burgundy, acquiring Frances Dee as his reward. Typical shot: Ronald Colman (Villon) and Basil Rathbone bowing to each other.

Garden of the Moon (Warner Bros.) represents a valiant effort on the part of its producers to understand and satisfy the mystic cravings of that big segment of the U. S. public now known as "jitter-bugs." Whether or not jitterbugs will like Garden of the Moon remains to be seen, but normal cinemaddicts probably will not. A morbidly cheerful little study of the rages induced in a cafe proprietor (Pat O'Brien) by his hysterical efforts to hire a satisfactory orchestra, it reaches its comic peak when he makes his pressagent (Margaret Lindsay) believe he is dying in order to persuade the bandleader hero (John Payne) to renew his contract. Best song: Love Is Where You Find It.

Also Showing

Breaking the Ice (RKO). Bobby Breen, this time down on Uncle William's farm, runs away to the city, gets a job singing in an ice-skating palace, finds there a playmate in accomplished, Sonia-Henious little Irene Dare.

Campus Confessions (Paramount).

Hank Luisetti, Stanford's basketball ace, performs true to stereotype as a collegiate hero who wins the Big Game with One Minute To Play.

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