Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 10, 1938

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That Certain Age (Universal) is another installment of the somewhat prolonged alleluia to adolescence which Deanna Durbin began in Three Smart Girls and has since continued in One Hundred Men and a Girl and Mad About Music. As explicitly stated in the title song, its somewhat debatable premise is that human existence reaches its peak with the first eccentric stirrings of adult sexual drives. As proof, That Certain Age cites the acute case of hero worship induced in its heroine, 15-year-old Alice Fullerton (Deanna Durbin), by an encounter with a blase war correspondent (Melvyn Douglas) of her father's newspaper chain. No sooner does he arrive to occupy the Fullerton guest house than Alice begins scribbling moonstruck entries in her diary, snubs her Boy Scout puppy-love (Jackie Cooper), withdraws from her role in a children's play and tries to talk her parents into letting her wear a grownup evening dress.

It takes the combined efforts of her father (John Halliday), mother (Irene Rich) and the embarrassed correspondent to effect a cure, evidenced when Alice resumes her role in the play and sings Delibes' Daughters of Cadiz.

The cinema's ablest specialist in roles of school-age girls since Mary Pickford was in her heyday, Deanna Durbin has a thoroughly mature soprano voice. Almost equally important, however, is her unique ability to make material which might be either saccharine or morbid seem not only wholesome but reasonably pleasant. There are times in That Certain Age when Miss Durbin's blitheness is a shade less winsome than wincemaking, but in general she comports herself as well as could be expected between songs, sings as brilliantly as usual. Good shot: seven-year-old Juanita Quigley, as the loyal little sister of Alice Fullerton's jilted Boy Scout, reading him portions of the Fullerton diary.

There Goes My Heart (Hal Roach-United Artists). They meet while the heiress, playing hooky from a tyrannical grandfather, is working incognito as a salesgirl in one of her own department stores. While this may not in itself set an altitude record for flights of fancy, its effect upon a story formula worn thin by endless repetition is amazingly beneficial. It permits Joan Butterfield (Virginia Bruce), while investigating how the other half exists, to enjoy the educational experience of living with a colleague named Peggy O'Brien (Patsy Kelly), whose boy friend (Alan Mowbray) is a subway motorman by profession and a mail-order chiropractor by avocation. It causes her romance with a reporter (Fredric March) to develop at a skating rink, where she wins a goldfish bowl in a hilarious game of musical chairs, and to approach fruition in the piquant seclusion of his shabby beach house.

First of a series of four pictures which Producer Hal Roach has scheduled for release under his new distributing contract with United Artists, There Goes My Heart appears to presage a happy renaissance not only for his company but for two round-faced onetime stars who appear in it. Rescued from oblivion by small supporting roles are Nancy Carroll, pert redhead of early talkies, and Harry Langdon, famed silent comedian.