Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 3, 1938

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Rosalie is the princess of a Balkan court who has gone to Vassar incognito. She has to return to Romanza for the spring festival, but Eddy promises to meet her there. To keep his promise, he makes a dashing solo hop across the Atlantic Ocean. He does not know Rosalie's last name but she has told him she will be wearing a pierrette costume at the fete. Sitting in the box of the King (Frank Morgan), Cadet Thorpe is discouraged by witnessing a gigantic ballet executed entirely by girls in pierrette costumes, but almost immediately Rosalie is carried in on top of a drum 16 feet high. With the invariable Powell black silk stockings covering a pair of legs which, though beautiful, are sexless, superhuman and morbidly adept, as if animated by a baleful intelligence of their own, Rosalie dances down a flight of 15 other drums, the last one only 12 inches high. This is the best dance in the show.

Best number: blonde, eye-filling Ilona Massey (real name: Hajmassy) singing Spring Love Is in the Air. Actress Massey was imported from Budapest last year because she combined ripely nubile beauty with an opera-trained voice. MGM now has Hollywood's largest foreign colony, recruited largely from along the Danube. A few: Luise Rainer, Delia Lind, Rose Stradner, Lili Hatvani, Stephen Bekassy , Hedy Lamarr, Konstantin Gorian. Still unapprehended is the studio wag who last November posted on the MGM gates a sign in Hungarian, meaning "English Spoken Here."