Cinema: The New Pictures Aug. 4, 1930

Manslaughter (Paramount). Thomas Meighan and Leatrice Joy were in a silent picture made from this story. It was a good silent picture by the standards of its time, but its revival as a talkie seems unnecessary. Oldfashioned, stagey, sentimental, it deals heavily with one or two remote social problems and, more immediately, with a young woman who goes to jail for having caused the death of a policeman who was chasing her automobile on his motorcycle. Her conviction is obtained, with patent suffering, by a prosecutor who has fallen in love with her. The absurdities involved in these events are made more obvious by jerky and tasteless direction and not helped much by Claudette Colbert’s efforts to take her part seriously. Worst shot: an epileptic having a seizure which, intended to be gruesome, will make most audiences laugh.

For the Defense (Paramount). Its mood and background more than its plot give this picture an unusual integrity. Over its fictional shadow-forms falls the shadow of a man whose importance in the social fabric of his time was not in the least fictional—the late William J. Fallon, ingenious and highly paid Manhattan criminal lawyer. Limited by screen convention and the familiar necessities of plot formula. For the Defense inevitably fails to confer on its barrister-hero that mystery, debonair and nefarious, which the real Fallon wore so effectively in his lifetime. Too much of it is contrivance— the hero bribing a juror to save his rival in love from a conviction for manslaughter and then going silently to Sing Sing to prove the nobility of his betrayed affection. This is the denouement, but the earlier scenes contain a sketch of the real Fallon—his suavity, his explosive wit in court, the egotism that created and supported his tremendous prestige. When Author Oliver H. P. Garrett shows crooks bringing back the car they have stolen, explaining apologetically that they did not know it was the lawyer’s; when the hero, impersonated by the suave William Powell, defends himself before the Bar association, the incidents are taken without much change from Fallen’s career. William B. Davidson handles the role of the district attorney in his customary able fashion. Somehow the cinematic little story manages to suggest what it is meant to—the grim, complicated machinery of a great city’s criminal courts. Best shot: Powell throwing a supposed bottle of nitroglycerine on the courtroom floor to confute the District Attorney. Oliver H. P. Garrett’s middle initials fool people. He is not an Oliver Hazard Perry but Oliver Hart Palmer Garrett. He once wondered whether to be an actor or a writer. In The Hairy Ape, he was hired by Arthur Hopkins to make an off-stage noise. He made his friends watch him in amateur performances in Brooklyn, but comments only encouraged him to take more seriously the reporting he was doing for the New York Sun and the now defunct Globe. Later, on the New York World, he was said to be Manhattan’s best-informed reporter on police and criminal activities. When Paramount began its policy of trying out newspapermen as scenario writers, he was one of the first reporters to become definitely successful in Hollywood. He is fond of driving a car fast, takes tennis lessons without noticeable improvement to his game, lives simply in a Beverly Hills bungalow with his son Peter, his wife Louise. Recently finding that he was going bald, he had all his hair cut off. Some pictures he has written or adapted: The Drag Net; Street of Chance; Ladies of the Mob; Forgotten Faces; Chinatown Nights; The Texan.