Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 6, 1936

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Dangerous (Warner). After innumerable backstage musicomedies leading the U. S. public to admire the typical Broadway actress as something in the nature of Elsie Dinsmore wearing tap shoes, this picture is an undertaking in which Warner Brothers generously exhibit the reverse of the medal, ornamented by the likeness of a stage lady of a different type. Joyce Heath (Bette Davis) is a minor-league Duse whose talents are impaired by a fondness for drink, lechery and offstage exhibitionism. She drives her husband to despair, causes a young architect (Franchot Tone) to jilt his fiancee (Margaret Lindsay), and wrecks his high-priced roadster on a tree. This produces a concussion and remorse, in which Joyce Heath abandons her bad ways.

A second-rate picture with first-rate trimmings, the fundamental absurdity of Dangerous is partially disguised in the suave dialog written for it by Laird Doyle and by the presence of Bette Davis, currently Hollywood's No. 1 impersonator of femmes fatales, whose wicked eye-poppings outdo those with which she made her reputation in Of Human Bondage. Typical shot: Franchot Tone muttering, "It can't go on like this."

If You Could Only Cook (Columbia). A light-hearted variation on-the theme of Cinderella, the picture concerns a jobless girl (Jean Arthur) who picks up a young man (Herbert Marshall) on a park bench and, unaware that he is the president of Buchanan Automobile Co. on the lookout for novel recreation, persuades him to pose as her husband so that they can apply for cook and butler work together. Their employer turns out to be a genial racketeer (Leo Carrillo), who does all he can to further his domestics' increasingly complicated career. Failing to marry his cook himself, he discovers that she is in love with the butler, who by this time has returned to his old job and is preparing to marry a young lady of fashion. A ceremony equivalent to that of fitting the glass slipper is achieved when the bridegroom finds himself kidnapped at a fashionable wedding, rushed off to the racketeer's establishment for a machine-gun marriage to the girl he really loves.

Like those earlier Columbia hits, It Happened One Night, Broadway Bill, Love Me Forever, If You Could Only Cook has a quality most easily assessed as charm, which definitely compensates for such minor shortcomings as its title, borrowed from an antique improper story and explainable only as one more evidence of the pitiful innocence of the Hays organization. Good shot: Herbert Marshall showing Jean Arthur his design for a roadster which Chrysler Corp. would do (well to examine closely.

King of Burlesque (Twentieth-Cen-tury-Fox). When Warner Baxter, a promoter of strip acts who aspires to more artistic realms, buys himself a society wife (Mona Barrie), it is a foregone conclusion that he will not profit by the bargain. What is not a foregone conclusion about King of Burlesque is the sudden meteoric pace it strikes when Mr. Baxter starts his comeback. The situation at this point is Baxter down & out, with Alice Faye, lead in his old burlesque show, seeking a way to help him without making herself known. She and Jack Oakie hire a sandwichman to impersonate a millionaire and finance Baxter's Broadway show with her money.