Cinema: The New Pictures Oct. 13, 1930

The Big Trail. Hollywood herded last week to look and listen at its gaudy Chinese theatre. The most expensive cinema ($2,000,000) since Hell’s Angels was there exhibited. The subject was pioneering. The medium was grandure (wide) film. The results were very good.

Pictorially said results were superb. Skeptical Hollywood saw wide film applied for the first time to a lusty outdoor theme. Snowstorms, deserts, mountains, prairies loomed up bigger and better than ever. Shots of plunging, thundering animals often took on the composition of good painting and the vigor of fine sculpture. Beauty was mingled cunningly with sweep and strength. Mass found its medium.

Ideally suited to this formidably imaginative photography was the theme of America’s conquest of the West. This was a salable idea long before The Covered Wagon and will still be salable long after The Big Trail. Director Raoul Walsh (The Cockeyed World) flaunted its hardships violently and often unforgettably. His emigrants fought the earth, the elements and the Indians vividly for twelve reels. At one point they even lowered their wagon train over a grim precipice on home made tackle.

The chief fault lay in what may be inaccurately called the drama. The story took hero (John Wayne) and heroine (Marguerite Churchill) through badly motivated antagonisms past conventionally villainous perils and into each other’s arms at last. Their trip was sometimes complicated by high flown dialog and stimulated by snatches of good comedy.

Actor Wayne, a newcomer, looks a little like Charles Farrell and a little like Gary Cooper. He was fresh and earnest, two admirable qualities which rarely make up for obvious unfamiliarity with the acting trade, particularly in talking pictures. Actress Churchill was better. Actor Tully Marshall was best of all and Swedish El Brendel was funniest.

At one point Mr. Wayne was called upon to declaim: “You folks are making history and history won’t stop.” It is doubtful if our forefathers were conscious of this factor in their travels. It is a little too obvious that these picture makers were. But this did not prevent the opening audience from applauding vigorously the theme, the scenery, the beasts.

Whoopee (Ziegfeld-Goldwyn). This is the handsomest, funniest musicomedy that has yet been photographed for the audible screen. It is done in Technicolor which is so good at times that the shades fall short of their usual resemblance to cheap Italian postcards; it contains a typical Ziegfeld chorus composed of tall beautiful girls who, in one decollete number, ride cowponies down a flight of steps. Most of it, of course, is Eddie Cantor, who gives ample evidence of why he makes more money than any other comedian. Few new jokes have been added to those that made Whoopee last two years on the Manhattan stage but the old ones are good enough, even in repetition, to put any show over. The plot, which is properly ignored most of the time, concerns a half-breed boy who wants to marry a white girl but cannot until the secret comes out in the last act that he is really white himself. Cantor’s part has no connection with the plot but he takes up three-quarters of the film. Best song—Cantor’s dirge about the sweetheart who became “the girlfriend of a boyfriend” of his, with its infinite variations. He sings that she became the soul mate of a cell mate of his, the real friend of a heel friend, etc., etc. Best sequences—Cantor telling about his operations; cooking a waffle in a ranch kitchen; selling souvenirs on a U. S. reservation as the only Jewish member of an Indian tribe.

Izzy Iskowitch was born on Eldridge Street, Manhattan, and was brought up by his grandmother, Esther. His first successful professional act was as “Mr. Ed ward Cantor, impersonator, aged 18.” Star of many Ziegfeld Follies, he is worth $2,500,000 but his checks are worthless unless signed by Dan Lipsky, his lifelong chum, now vice-president of Manufacturers’ Trust Co. and Cantor’s proxy for life. Marjorie, Natalie, Edna, Marilyn and Janet Cantor are his daughters. He wants a son, has a delicate digestion, likes to be thought the originator of all the gags he uses. Said he recently: “I believe Whoopee is the greatest performance of my career. Rather than have my public remember me by some later performance not so good, I am going to retire.”

The Bad Man (First National). When the late Holbrook Blinn appeared on the stage as Pancho Lopez, sentimental and swaggering Mexican bandit invented by Porter Emerson Browne, the part seemed to have a certain value as satire. It was the function of this Mexican to make absurd the repressions of average U. S. people, particularly a little group of them who are staying on a ranch when Pancho makes his appearance. Unfortunately, The Bad Man was so successful that it has been imitated often and the imitations have taken from this tardy reproduction of the original, the freshness it should have had. Walter Huston takes the part that Blinn took. Audiences who have the choice of seeing him at neighborhood theatres either as Pancho, or in the tall hat and whiskers of Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith’s current release (TIME, Sept. 8) should see Lincoln first. The Bad Man is more amusing than most westerns, but no masterpiece. Best sequence—in which Huston discourses on the value of bad husbands.

Young Woodley (Elstree). Made in England, this photograph of John Van Druten’s play about schoolboys is a well-acted talkie but not a well-made one. Even with the most skillful handling, the theme of a sixth former in love with the pretty wife of his elderly headmaster would have involved tedious moments. Playwright Van Druten, 22 when he wrote it, was tremendously in earnest about the whole thing and unwilling to permit comic possibilities to distract his attention from the clinical aspects of adolescent love. He achieved a kind of lyrical intensity which has been blurred in the picture. Young Woodley is long-drawn and a shade sentimental in spite of the fact that the schoolboys dress and behave like schoolboys, and that Madeleine Carroll looks and dresses like a master’s wife, and that Frank Lawton is thoroughly convincing as Young Woodley. Best shot—the prefects guying Woodley about his love-affair.

The White Hell of Pitz Palu (Universal). The villain of this film is the north wall of an impassable mound of ice —Pitz Palu in the Alps. A young couple on their honeymoon coming to climb the mountain for fun find a man living in a hut halfway up. He too had come on his honeymoon to climb Pitz Palu; an avalanche had swept his wife down to death, he had haunted the place ever since. The drama takes shape in the attraction of the sombre, mountain-fighting hermit for the young woman who has come there with her husband. Through every sequence a sense of impending disaster increases, to culminate on a ledge over the precipice where the three people are marooned together. The photography is wonderfully effective. In spite of its garish and awkward title, The White Hell of Pitz Palu would be one of the year’s best foreign importations if Universal had not been afraid to release it without sound, or at the worst with an incidental sound accompaniment. Instead, they did something that takes rank with the most memorable stupidities of the picture business—they grafted the voice of Broadcaster Graham McNamee into the film in an explanatory lecture. Mr. McNamee points out the grandeurs of God’s handiwork, the Alps.* In the pauses of McNamee’s awed superlatives, audiences will become aware that an unusual and important picture has been irremediably spoiled. Best shot—Ernst Udet, German aviator, taking his plane through a gorge.

* Last week Mrs. Graham McNamee entertained the radio audience with a speech, “My Husband at Home.” She revealed that he likes blue neckties, loses his keys, his collar buttons.