Cinema: The New Pictures Nov. 11, 1929

The Trespasser (United Artists). This is an artificial picture which becomes effective partly because of its faults. If it were more sensible you might not be able to tell how far Gloria Swanson is personally responsible for what merit it has. As it is, you are interested all the time in the way her brilliant acting makes credible the overexcited story of a woman whose principles and weak husband spoil life for her. She is a stenographer. Her husband is the son of a millionaire. When her father-in-law has broken up her marriage she is kept by another man. Later she engages in a contest of self-sacrifice with her former husband’s new wife. The plot is full of “audience value,” i. e., emotional sequences rising out of each other so rapidly as to eliminate the narration necessary in ordinary stories. Through its unrealities, Gloria Swanson is handsome, restrained, adroit, in good voice. Best shot:—Swanson saying goodbye to her little boy.

The Mississippi Gambler (Universal). When Showboat was finished, Universal had plenty of material left over—pantalettes, clippings of river scenes, Joseph Schildkraut’s southern accent, beaver hats, some expensive Mississippi locations. These fragments are here thrown together on a framework involving the inherent nobility of a gambler who, after winning the parish funds from Colonel Blackburn, falls so much in love with the Colonel’s daughter (Joan Bennett) that he lets her win them back again. Silliest shot: Miss Bennett hearing of her father’s betrayal.

Sweetie (Paramount). Frankly extravagant, Sweetie is a football romance staged at a musical comedy college where the students are well-known film players doing entertainment specialties. William Austin is the sissified professor. Helen Kane carries an air-rifle and sings her “poop-a-doop” songs. Nancy Carroll is the pretty girl who inherits a boys’ college and bets her claim to it that her team can beat Oglethorpe. Jack Oakie, Broadway showman, changes the hymnlike school song to a ditty called “Alma Mammy.” There is also a red-headed fellow who says that a preposition is something you ask a girl. That no college on earth was ever like Pelham does not detract from the fun in Sweetie so much as the director’s obvious uncertainty whether he was making a satire or a straight story. Typical shot: a football hero with a loose shoe.

The Isle of Lost Ships (First National). This is the dialog adaptation of a six-year-old picture built around the legend that there is an island in the Sargasso Sea composed of wrecked hulls. Action gets going around three survivors of the latest wreck—a girl, a man convicted of murder, a comedy detective. Occasionally effective camera work fails to make up for stolid sequences of dialog explaining the locale, or for the pathetic struggle between the hero and the scav-engers who live on the lost ships. Silliest shot: the super-scavenger being ceremoniously married to the unconscious body of the heroine.

Double

One of those human beings who make their living by substituting in dangerous situations for cinematically valuable heroes and heroines has emerged from the anonymity of his species by putting his name—Dick Grace—to a book.* Bom in Mohall, Minn., son of a former justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Grace learned to fly during the War. He became a double when, penniless, he took a high-dive on the Fox lot in place of a professional who had lost his nerve. Slender, muscular, quiet, high-strung, with a resolute and impish face and a thin neck still stiff from being recently broken, Grace now makes more money than any other stunter. Before he attempts his stunts spectators frequently bet that he will be killed. He shrewdly covers all bets himself.

Grace’s specialty is wrecking planes to order (Wings, Lilac Time, The Flying Circus). Directors order the kind of crash they want just as a contractor orders material, specifying how fast the plane must be going when it hits, how far from the cameras, whether right side up or on its back, etc. etc. Once, to prove his accuracy, Grace laid a handkerchief on the ground, took off in a plane, smashed the plane within reach of the handkerchief. Once as he did acrobatics on the fuselage a gale tore his clothes off, left him sailing naked through the air. Once standing on top of a dummy building soaked with gasoline and burning furiously, he saw unbearable heat keep away the firemen supposed to hold the net for his jump. Once while rescuers worked with a blowtorch to get him out he lay in a torpedo tube that had been pumped so full of pressure that the doors were jammed. For fees of $35 to $5,000 he has been thrown to lions, driven cars over precipices, crawled over live wires, been burned in a ballet-skirt, swung over pools of molten steel.

Of such adventures he writes with gusto, with sadness for luckless comrades—one burned to a black wisp on live wires; another who in a burning plane fell into an oil well at night; a high diver whose eye was ripped out when he hit a matchstick floating in his tank; a jumper who from two stories up landed astride one side of a huge packing-box; another who after a short fall lay on a cement floor screaming for someone to kill him; an animal trainer who was trampled to death by a property elephant which was hanged in turn from a metal crane. Among his least pleasant experiences he lists hearing a spectator in a cinema theatre deride as “fake” a dive which broke the pelvic bone of a fellow-stunter.

*SQUADRON OF DEATH—Dick Grace—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).