Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 23, 1933

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Tillie and Gus (Paramount). Tillie (Alison Skipworth) is the dilapidated proprietress of a waterfront gambling house in China. Gus (W. C. Fields) is a down-at-heels Alaskan gambler, who has just escaped being lynched for murder. Long since divorced, Gus and Tillie are reunited by the terms of Tillie's brother's will: he bequeaths them an antique mortgage-ridden ferryboat. Living on the boat when Tillie and Gus come to claim it are Tillie's niece (Jacqueline Wells), her husband and an imperturbable infant (Baby LeRoy). It becomes necessary, in order to thwart a rival ferryboat operator, for Fields, Skipworth, Wells and gurgling LeRoy to win a race in the Keystone in the course of which LeRoy falls overboard in a washtub and Fields stokes the boilers with boxes of roman candles. Part parody of Tugboat Annie, part pure farce, Tillie and Gus is one of the pleasanter chapters in the long and happy career of W. C. Fields's famed unlighted cigar. Baby LeRoy, now 19 months old, has taken up walking since his first picture, A Bedtime Story, but remains incapable of speech. To make him cry, his director orders Baby LeRoy to blow his nose. He has the longest contract without options in Hollywood ; it was signed by his grand mother because his widowed mother, Mrs. LeRoy Winebrenner of Altadena, Calif., was only 16. Actor LeRoy works two hours a day, in seven-minute intervals. At 10:30 a. m. he takes a nap. Like most featured players he has two "stand-ins"' (understudies) to take his place on the set while lights and props are being ar ranged. He likes baked potatoes, butter, spinach, zwieback, watches that have a loud tick. He distrusts W. C. Fields. His next picture will be Mrs. Fane's Baby Is Stolen, specially written for him by George Washington's debunker, Rupert Hughes. Bombshell (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Lola Burns (Jean Harlow) has a mop of platinum blonde hair, a four-post bed in a lacquer white bedroom, a fat contract with Monarch Pictures. She has a thieving secretary, a vulgar, fatuous father, a brother so stupid that it is impossible to tell when he is drunk and three miraculously fluffy old English sheepdogs. Bombshell exhibits a few significant incidents in Lola Burns's ecstatically awful life. Pursued by a marquis, an over-virile director and a wild-eyed studio publicity man named Space Hanlon (Lee Tracy), Lola's life is really no more than a negative for her pictures, a high-speed press for headlines. Hanlon has the marquis arrested for not renewing his passport; Lola gets the director to put up the bail. Before the screamer headlines on the first story have time to cool, Hanlon arranges for count and director to come to blows at Lola's house. The fight not only produces more headlines; it thwarts Lola's scheme, which Hanlon thinks might dull her lurid reputation, to adopt a baby, because it scandalizes the lady inspectors from the orphan asylum. When she makes up her mind to run away from it all, there comes into Lola's life, with a suddenness that she fails to find suspicious, something beautiful. He is Gifford Middleton of the Boston Middletons. He tells her that her hair is like a field of silver daisies. Lola is broken-hearted when her father and brother spoil the Middleton romance by scandalizing the Middleton parents—until it turns out that all the Middletons are really down-at-heel actors hired to shame Lola into

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