Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 11, 1933

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Dancing Lady (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). A burlesque dancer named Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford) meets a jaunty young socialite named Tod Newton (Franchot Tone). He sees to it that she gets a front line position in the chorus of a deluxe revue. The revue's dance director (Clark Gable) observes that she has talent and enthusiasm, makes her the star.

If the cinema is a trustworthy reporter of life, producing a musical comedy must be a superhuman task. In this picture such difficulties as are to be anticipated crop up in connection with the musicomedy, called Dancing Lady. Gloomy, irascible, gnawed by dark creative fervors, the dance director presently hears that his backer has withdrawn his support because the young socialite wants his inamorata to be, not an actress, but his companion on a trip to Cuba. As vapid a snip as has ever disgraced his class in the cinema, Tod seems vaguely hurt because Janie, when she learns what subterfuges he has used, goes back to the musicomedy which the dance director is financing from his own pocket, helps the opening night to be completely gala.

Though Dancing Lady conforms to the rule that all cinemusicals have the same plot and the same characters, it is not a carbon copy. It is Forty-Second Street in sables. All dance directors in the cinema are serious and frenetic artists but Clark Gable is more morbidly devoted to his routines than Warner Baxter in Warner Brothers musicals. Franchot Tone takes his burlesque girl to his country home with more snobbish head-wagglings than those used for similar purposes by Buddy Rogers in Take a Chance. In her serious characterization of Janie Barlow as an inspired, warm-hearted runaway angel, Joan Crawford makes thoroughly apparent the fact that she is now abler as an actress than as a dancer. Good shots: Robert Benchley as a Broadway colyumist, languidly asking for a pencil; the start of Dancing Lady's flashiest musical number, with Fred Astaire going through routines which Joan Crawford tries to follow.

Sitting Pretty (Paramount) concerns two songwriters, one serious (Jack Haley) and one deluded by conceit (Jack Oakie), who hitchhike from Manhattan to Hollywood, there indulge in romance, alcohol and creative work. Haley becomes attached to a blonde waif (Ginger Rogers) who meets the pair on their way West, follows them to Hollywood. Oakie grows fond of an erratic actress (Thelma Todd), who abandons him when he loses his job.

Sitting Pretty contains two good songs ("Good Morning. Glory," ''Did You Ever See a Dream Walking"), a dance routine with ostrich feathers and an air of total irresponsibility which often makes it definitely funny.

Hoopla (Fox) is a tardy adaptation of Kenyon Nicholson's famed play The Barker, directed by Frank Lloyd (Cavalcade, Berkeley Square) and designed to re-establish the vanished prestige of Actress Clara Bow. She is Lou, hardboiled dancer in a carnival, who, to oblige the mistress of the proprietor (Preston Foster), makes advances to his callow son (Richard Cromwell), ends by marrying the son.