The New Pictures

The Flame of New Orleans (Universal). The gay and adventurous tart has given many a cinemaddict 90 minutes of release and fun. In The Flame of New Orleans Marlene Dietrich, fresh from the sultry antics of Seven Sinners and under the direction of famed French Director Rene Clair (Le Million), rides again.

As Claire Ledoux, an international trollop who has exhausted the capitals of Europe, Miss Dietrich sets up in business in 1840 New Orleans as a visiting countess. With a strictly professional faint she snags a rich, romantic, somewhat addled bachelor (Roland Young). A Russian dandy (Mischa Auer) who knew her in St. Petersburg arrives, and the strain of playing two people in the same town drives her to marry, not the Creole gallant, but a handsome, young riverboat skipper (Bruce Cabot) who met her in the park one day when his monkey got fouled in her carriage.

Lean, sad Director Clair made his first English picture with Grade A Playwright Robert Sherwood. It was The Ghost Goes West, a satiric fantasy about an amorous Scottish shade, and it was a ten-strike (TIME, Jan. 20, 1936). But The Flame of New Orleans, scripted by Norman Krasna (Bachelor Mother), is no equal of The Ghost. Occasional touches--word of La Dietrich's honky-tonk past conveyed from ear to ear at her introduction to New Orleans' society, a wedding gown floating mysteriously down the Mississippi, shutters opening drowsily on the quay at dawn--give proof that Clair is still there. But the rest is without much imagination or invention.

Apparently told not to play her siren straight, Miss Dietrich is naturally at a loss. By nature so sirenish that she is already practically a satire of a siren, she can scarcely be expected to kid herself. Her pretty posturing, pouts, stunned, exotic stares are meaningless when she tries to do them once over lightly. Pretty to look at, they are wasted voltage in a picture that aims to be a gentle comedy of 19th-Century manners.

Rookies on Parade (Republic) is designed to display the talents of Bing Crosby's little brother Bob. It can also serve as a stern warning to militarists to keep U.S. Army camps out of the hands of Hollywood.

First thing Draftee Wilson (Bob Crosby) thinks of after getting to camp is how to make Uncle Sam bankroll the musical comedy he had hoped to sell to a Broadway producer. He puts on the show. So delighted is the commandant with its morale-building potentialities that he inadvertently causes Wilson to repent, keep the show for the Army.

Personable Bob Crosby looks like his brother, talks like him, resembles him no further. Singer Ruth Terry (Alexander's Ragtime Band] reveals that she has not forgotten how to sell a song; Songstress Gertrude Niesen is scarcely given a chance to. Silly shot: Comedian Eddie Foy Jr. giving commands to his platoon in such a singsong voice that the platoon breaks into a conga.

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