Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 20, 1936

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Riffraff (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is what Hollywood calls a box-office picture, meaning one whose merits, if any, will be revealed at the ticket slot rather than in the comments it will occasion. What will make it box-office is that it evokes, out of the half-forgotten time when pictures could be naughty, the original Jean Harlow.

Horrible though it will seem to the Legion of Decency, she is up to her old tricks, kissing with her mouth open, listening unabashed to lines like, "Take off your clothes and stay awhile." Spencer Tracy is the cocky tuna fisherman whom she sticks to even though Nick Appopolis, the fish-cannery owner, assaults her virtue with a matrimonial offer and a neckpiece made of well-bleached cat-fur. When her fisherman leaves her to go on the bum, she steals a roll of bills for him from Nick. Sentenced for this, she gets out of prison through a drainpipe, is reunited with her tuna fisherman, only to give herself up to the law when he promises to quit his cocky ways, work again.

Maudlinity is the keynote of Riffraff. Its situations come out of a can that was stale long before the first tuna was tinned. And it makes no effort to turn to account the genuine picturesqueness of the San Pedro, Calif, docks, where most of Riffraff was shot. Best scene: the finance company reclaiming the allurements of the Tracy-Harlow home.