The New Pictures: Mar. 25, 1935

The Wedding Night (Samuel Goldwyn). Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper) and his wife (Helen Vinson) return to his inherited Connecticut farmhouse so that he can write a novel undistracted by their Bohemian friends. Their next door neighbors are a family of Polish tobacco farmers whose quaint ways appear to Tony ideal material for a book. When the Poles buy one of his fields, he lets his wife go back to town with the money, settles down to serious research on his subject.

By far the most interesting member of the Nowak family is young Manya (Anna Sten), who presently becomes not only the heroine of Tony Barrett's book but also its inspiration. By the time Dora Barrett comes back, Tony is ready to ask for a divorce but by this time Manya, convinced that her attachment for Tony has reached an impasse, has married the loutish young Pole (Ralph Bellamy) to whom her father has promised her. The situation explodes suddenly on their wedding night. Enraged when he finds Manya weeping and reluctant, her drunken bridegroom rushes out to kill the man he suspects she loves. Manya follows him to the Barretts' house. Trying to separate her husband and Tony Barrett as they scuffle on the stairs, Manya falls. When the two men reach her she is dead.

Because the cinema has so frequently used inapposite happy endings for purely commercial reasons, there is a tendency to regard as artistically courageous any film in which the heroine breaks her neck. Also, since Anna Sten has been introduced to the U. S. public as a glamorous composite of Greta Garbo and Mae West, a picture in which her physical charms are concealed by a mackinaw and a woolen stocking-cap obviously constitutes a daring innovation. The merits of The Wedding Night are more substantial than criticisms which dwell on these superficial factors may lead cinemaddicts to suppose. A sober, admirably realistic investigation of the futility of the back-to-the-soil movement among Manhattan's literati, it is written with honesty and humor, acted with understanding, made exciting by King Vidor's intelligent direction. Good shot: Taka, Tony Barrett's absconding Japanese houseboy, tiptoeing across a field of snow.

Gold Diggers of 1935 (Warner) should go far toward verifying the suspicion that Director Busby Berkeley's bizarre cinematic dance routines have lost all but academic interest. His masterpiece this time is a tableau in which a double row of white pianos, at which chorus girls sit waving their hands as though playing waltzes, waver, spin, undulate and finally assemble into a platform on which Gloria Stuart does a tap dance. Cinemaddicts who feel that this represents a perceptible improvement on Berkeley's shadow waltz in Gold Diggers of 1933 are likely also to enjoy the presentation of the best song in the picture, "Lullaby of Broadway," in which Winifred Shaw's head is suddenly and with ghastly effect imposed as a transparent silhouet over an airplane photograph of Times Square.