Ah Wilderness! (Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer). The growing pains of a young generation, tossing uneasily on its antimacassars somewhere in New England, have been expertly woven into this adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play about an adolescent taking his first look at the grown-up world of 1906. Ah Wilderness! is notable also for one of those curiosities of billing that cinema contracts sometimes bring about. Wallace Beery, billed as the star, plays what amounts to an expanded bit-part. He is Uncle Sid, affable and alcoholic parasite who sponges a living in the family of Nat Miller, smalltown newspaper publisher. Nat Miller is played by Lionel Barrymore whose part, though written down considerably from the play, is still an important one and who gets second billing. The real lead (Richard) is Eric Linden, who gets no special billing at all, worked in the picture as a free lance, and was much rejoiced to get a contract out of it.
Richard is the boy who wants to right the wrongs of the Social System in a crushing valedictory address, which is interrupted, amid great applause, at the end of a stereotyped preamble. A brilliant, poetic idealist, he gets into trouble with the father of his girl (Cecilia Parker) because he has given her verses by that renegade, Algernon Charles Swinburne. When he believes that she has spurned his love, Richard samples his first kisses and his first drinks in company with a fast-stepping lady from New Haven, who wears flounces, high-laced shoes, low-slung garters.
Playwright O'Neill, admittedly, was skylarking, insofar as it comports with the dignity of U. S. Playwright No. 1 to skylark, when he got period laughs out of his sentimental little comedy. Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich have gone further, using the sound frame of O'Neill's drama as the basis for a period pastiche. It is all there, for people who can think back 30 years: the band concert on the common; the tandem bicycles, shirtwaist watches, lemonade and porch swings; the crested brewery horses, prancing to the political club picnic on the Fourth of July; the bombardment of firecrackers which on that date turned the streets of every U. S. city into miniature battlefields. But even those who do not know what a Stanley Steamer was and never said ''Twenty-three Skiddoo" will still take pleasure in Ah Wilderness!
East of Java (Universal). An ex-gangster named Red Bowers (Charles Bickford) becomes a leader of men when cast ashore on an island off East Africa together with the crew, passengers and cargo, mostly lions, of the tramp steamer Sea Dragon. East of Java was adapted from Gouverneur Morris' Tiger Island by able Screenwriter James Creelman, and regardless of its minor sins against credulity it has a reckless tempo and a tendency for killing off its cast, unusual and charming as a contrast to the current prissy mode of photographing people who sit around on sofas talking imitation Philip Barry.