Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 3, 1938

You're A Sweetheart (Universal) is a sorry reversion to the type of cinemusical that cluttered up the primeval age of sound. Dwarfed by gigantically phony settings, actors who seem like puppety moppets make themselves ridiculous by chirping like birds in feathered finery, by performing unlovely routines in ballet groups. Songstress Alice Faye. borrowed from Twentieth Century-Fox for this howdydo, almost succeeds in putting over the title song and one called My Fine Feathered Friend in spite of directing that dotes on facial closeups. What little plot there is burdens Miss Faye with just enough straight dialogue to demonstrate that she has a cute case of minus Rs. She is not at her best hoping that her dweams may come twue. She is at her best in the film's finale, swinging practically over the garden wall on the rhymes and rhythms of When You and I Were Young, Maggie. The other bright spot in You're A Sweetheart is Dancer George Murphy who, after more than ten years of hoofing, is emerging as Fred Astaire's serious rival. His dancing to Scrapin' the Toast is as nicely timed as a fast double play, and considerably more involved.

Most of the good taste at Universal nowadays is lavished on Deanna Durbin musicals and first-rate program pictures. Before the present syndicate, headed by Manhattan Banker John Cheever Cowdin, bought out aging "Uncle Carl" Laemmle. Universal was famous for horror pictures, starring the late Lon Chancy, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff. Low point of You're A Sweetheart—a gilded living effigy (A. A. Trimble) of the late Will Rogers, rising on a pedestal amid a throng of cowgirl cuties, who stand with reverently bowed heads—is in the old tradition.

Tovarich (Warner Bros.) was cinematized from the successful Jacques Deval play about White Russian refugees in Paris. Warner Brothers are supposed to have paid $100,000 for the screen rights but spent $1,300,000 more to make certain that the cinema would be just as successful as the play. They borrowed three of the screen's most persuasive players (Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Basil Rathbone), hired a Russian-born Parisian director (Anatole Litvak) to insure a continental flavor and gave him an unlimited budget. The result is a mature, highly enjoyable cinecomedy not too slavishly adhering to the form of the original.

It is quite a shock to the Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna (Claudette Colbert) when she is informed that the Bastille is something more to Frenchmen than a mere station on the Metro. Indignantly she and her consort, General Prince Mikail Alexandrovitch Ouratieff (Charles Boyer), flee the Quatorze Juillet fete on the Left Bank, sneak past their unpaid landlord into the grotesque poverty of their room in the Hotel du Quercy. There, where their bed collapses and Tatiana tears Mikail's shirttails to make handkerchiefs, they resolutely decide to accept domestic situations rather than dip into the 40 billion francs (gold) left in Mikail's trust by the Tsar.