Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 5, 1935

The New Pictures

Smart Girl (Paramount). When Kent Taylor rings the doorbell of a big house to serve a legal paper on its owner, the door is opened by Ida Lupino who three minutes later proposes to the process-server. Not impressed by her apparent flippancy, he marries, instead, her sister Kay (Gail Patrick) and struggles valiantly to help both girls through the hard times that follow their bankrupt father’s suicide. Miss Lupino goes to work for a German milliner (Joseph Cawthorn) and proceeds to demonstrate that, in spite of her smart talk, she is the one he should have picked.

A pleasant little comedy, Smart Girl marks success in a new technique for its producer. Walter Wanger, whose schedule of ambitious productions (Gabriel Over the White House, The President Vanishes, Private Worlds, Shanghai), has never before included a piece deliberately designed, as this one is, for the supporting half of double bills. People with sharp eyes who have seen Shanghai may recognize a set or two cleverly redecorated and shot from new angles. (Boyer’s apartment in Shanghai is the penthouse in Smart Girl; the Stock Exchange bar. the New York cafe.) Smart Girl was previewed six times before its official Hollywood unveiling in an effort to decide whether Pinky Tomlin ought to sing or not. Finally his song was removed but his jackass laughter and owlish solemnity as the milliner’s Dummkopf of a son were left in with happy results. He is in real life an Oklahoma crooner who arrived in Hollywood five months ago with $100 in his pocket, half of which he gave to the orchestra leader in the Biltmore Bowl to let him sing his song. The Object of My Affection. Since then he has made close to $100,000 crooning, acting, and selling at huge prices five new songs to film companies.

The Murder Man (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). “All right,” roars Steve Grey (Spencer Tracy), the hero of this picture, “I’ll write you the greatest story your cheesy newspaper has ever printed. Now get out of here and shut up.” Since this is the way newspaper reporters customarily speak to their editors in the cinema, audiences at The Murder Man will not be surprised to learn that instead of being fired Steve Grey gets a bonus. Of more consequence is the probability that they will fail to be surprised also at the contents of Steve Grey’s story. The story, a death-house interview with an investment racketeer (Harvey Stephens) whom Grey’s testimony has helped to convict and whose arrest and trial he has covered with breath-taking efficiency, is meant to afford the denouement of the film and, handled with more care, it might have been an exceedingly effective melodramatic twist. Unfortunately, Authors Tim Whelan (who also directed the film) and Guy Bolton built up to it poorly through the earlier portions of the picture, which develop Grey’s romance with the director of the Star’s “Lovelorn Column” (Virginia Bruce). The Murder Man is consequently only a little better than the average popgun and city-room mystery play, distinguished mainly by the agreeable acting of its two seasoned principals.

Old Man Rhythm (RKO). The conception of a college campus as a place where young men and women spend their time in making animal sounds to imitate saxophones or dabbling, in rumble seats, with the tentative aspects of sex became obsolete in 1929. The fact that most con temporary undergraduates are seriously engaged in the pursuit of learning, makes it the more shocking to find the old point of view revived even by a medium so fran tically unrealistic as the musical cinema. In Old Man Rhythm, the students at "Fairfield" are first encountered being conveyed back to their classrooms by a streamlined train, on which they while away the time by blubbering a song. At Fairfield, the issue which presents itself is whether Johnny Roberts (Charles Buddy Rogers) will respond to the wiles of the campus siren (Grace Bradley) or to the less pressing advances of the girl (Barbara Kent) his father has picked out for him. When Johnny Roberts’ father (George Barbier) arrives at Fairfield and enrolls as a freshman, the problem begins to seem capable of solution. The comedy peak in all this is reached in a scene with the registrar, in which a lengthy misunderstanding results from the fact that Roberts Sr. is not a senior but a freshman while Roberts Jr. is not a junior but a sophomore. Cinemaddicts who while watching Old Man Rhythm find themselves afflicted by an uneasy feeling that the picture is some ort of a nightmare recollection, are likely to have the conviction fortified when they recognize the leading man. Charles Buddy Rogers is the same Buddy Rogers who in 1928 enjoyed the sobriquet of “America’s Boy Friend” and received more fan mail than any other actor in the world. The revulsion which the cinema public finally experienced for Buddy Rogers in 1931 might have been listed as one of the salutary effects of Depression but it was also partly due to the obvious fact that he seemed to have outgrown adolescent roles. Consequently, the notion of restoring him to favor, now that he has grown fatter and even more mature, by reconstructing the type of film in which the public was sick of seeing him several years ago must be regarded as one of the more mystic achievements of Hollywood’s producing intuition.

When he lost his hold on the cinema public in 1931, Buddy Rogers became the leader of a jazz band which played at New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania, The World’s Fair, Chicago’s College Inn. In 1933, he appeared in Take A Chance (Paramount), his last U. S. cinema. Last summer, when his band ran out of contracts, he went to London, appeared in a low-grade film named Dance Band. Famed motto of “America’s Boy Friend” in 1928 was: “There are just two things in life to watch: your morals and your health.” In his film appearances Buddy Rogers refused to speak roughly to a lady, smoke tobacco or do anything else which he was unwilling to do offscreen. In the last few years, grown more sophisticated, he has discovered grey hairs, asked to have himself billed as Charles Rogers, been mentioned frequently as an escort to Mary Pickford. In Old Man Rhythm Buddy Rogers brandishes a pipe.