Science: The New Pictures: Aug. 31, 1936

Piccadilly Jim (Metro -Goldwyn -Mayer). When Caricaturist Jim Crocker (Robert Montgomery) hears Ann (Madge Evans), a U. S. beauty who enthralled him in a London bar, remark that she is going for a morning canter, he appears on the bridle trail in full-dress clothes, mounted upon a cart horse. Little does he know that the lady loved by his egregious father (Frank Morgan) is Ann’s Aunt Eugenia (Billie Burke). When his pursuit of Ann costs him his job, he boils the pot with a comic strip inspired by those members of her family whom he has met through his father—the henpecked uncle (Grant Mitchell), the socially ambitious, bullying Mrs. Nesta Pett (Cora Wither spoon), the incorrigible, Eton-suited little nephew (Tommy Bupp). As the Richswitch family of the strip, they become the instantly recognized and hilariously appreciated source of an international guffaw. Only by reconstructing the characters in the strip does Piccadilly Jim restore the abused Petts to sanity, establish himself with Ann, preserve his father from masquerading, for Eugenia’s sake, as a Danish Count in tortoise-shell glasses and crepe whiskers.

Screenwriters Charles Brackett and Edwin Knopf permit their gusto in these complications to slow up the story, but occasional lapses from pace and over-energetic mugging on the part of the Pett family are not serious faults. Best of the scenes is the one in which Jim scrapes acquaintance with the heroine by apologizing for the fumbling attempts of an amiably drunken friend (Robert Benchley) to do likewise.

Sing Baby Sing (Twentieth Century-Fox) opens with the warning that any resemblance the characters may have to real people is due to coincidence. Seldom, if ever, has the remarkable influence of coincidence on screen writing been so apparent. After Joan (Alice Faye) has met Farraday (Adolphe Menjou) in a night club, their romance curiously suggests certain headline episodes in the recent love-life of Miss Elaine Barrie and Mr. John Barrymore.

Joan is a jobless showgirl whose agent Nicky (Gregory Ratoff) gets national publicity for her when Farraday, a famed film actor with Shakespearean inclinations, fancies her as his ideal Juliet. Vigorously vacationing, but forbidden alcohol, Farraday is kept supplied by Nicky with bay rum (“South American brandy”), which he absorbs out of a hot-water bottle, through a straw. Stimulated, Romeo is madly in love with Juliet. Sober, he has no use for her. Kidnapped by his manager to keep him out of trouble, Romeo is chased across the U. S. by Juliet and Nicky, finally corralled for a radio broadcast which gives fame to Juliet and to Sing Baby Sing a final series of musical numbers.

Adorned with able comics (Patsy Kelly, Ted Healy, Gregory Ratoff), full of good tunes (Love Will Tell, You Turned the Tables on Me, When Did You Leave Heaven), Sing Baby Sing deserts the polite little plots which are the current fashion in screen musicals, originates its own form. It is a combination of hilarious farce and bigtime revue.

Good moments: the Ritz Brothers (cast by Zanuck after a Sunday evening session in Hollywood’s Trocadero) singing The Music Goes Round and Around; Tony

Martin, a new baritone singing When Did You Leave Heaven; Menjou in a hospital nightshirt. ” Seven Sinners (Gaumont British) is a frank attempt to duplicate the success of, last year’s outstandingly good Gaumont British comic-melodrama The Thirty-Nine Steps. A close imitation in urbane direction, restrained acting, swift pace, it has one important difference. Whereas The Thirty-Nine Steps was the tale of a hunted man, Seven Sinners is the story of a hunter.

Carousing at a Nice festival, an engagingly flip U. S. detective named Harwood (Edmund Lowe) discovers a corpse, which presently vanishes. Before Harwood can launch a search, a beautiful U. S. insurance claim investigator named Caryl Fenton (Constance Cummings) drags him away to look for some lost jewels in Scotland. When the train is wrecked on the way, Harwood discovers the missing body in the wreckage, shrewdly suspects that the wreck was intentional to hide the murder. He bets the French police inspector on the scene $5.000 that he will find the criminal. There follows, as in The Thirty-Nine Steps, a series of extraordinary adventures, with two more train wrecks, a half-dozen murders, shots in the night, rough & tumble fights, many a comically dangerous interview.

Pursuing a bland course through all this excitement, Detectives Harwood and Fenton eventually dig through the intrigues of a bogus reform group, pin the crimes on the least suspectable person in a final melee, which, for those cinemaddicts who want their mysteries solved with explicit completeness, is about the only unsatisfying thing in the picture.