Cinema: The New Pictures: Sep. 14, 1931

Waterloo Bridge (Universal) is a glum but manageable anecdote of prostitution and the War. The heroine, strolling on London’s Waterloo Bridge, picks up the hero during the confusion of an air raid. He, a Canadian soldier, fails to perceive that she is a prostitute. She, because she is one, refuses to marry him. This situation could scarcely have had a cheerful resolution but the one the story gives it seems almost a conspiracy in woe. The soldier takes the girl to visit his mother and step father. She tells his mother what she is and runs away back to London. The soldier follows her. learns all about her from her landlady and, still eager to marry her, finds her again on Waterloo Bridge. They say good-bye in another convenient tur moil of Zeppelins and searchlights. The soldier sets off for the front. The girl, by lighting a cigaret, has herself destroyed by a bomb. Director James Whale, who made a fine picture of Journey’s End, was faced by a harder job in Waterloo Bridge. The stage play by Robert Emmet Sherwood lent itself superbly to the manufacture of a third-rate cinematic tearjerker. Director Whale, perceiving that its sentimentalities would be more effective if they were subdued, disguised them carefully and was terse in scenes which might have been heavily dramatic. Director Whale is sup posed to be the quietest megaphone artist in Hollywood. A onetime playwright and stage director, he seldom interrupts his actors or leaves his chair to show them what to do. His sedentary technique must have been particularly practical for Waterloo Bridge since he had an expert cast whose major deficiency is no more im portant than a heterogeny of accents and, in one scene, the gingerly demeanor toward tennis rackets that is universal on stage and screen. The soldier (Kent Douglass) seems naif but not absurd; his stepfather (Frederick Kerr) is a magnificently deaf old gentleman whose grunts and questions are not only real but funny. Mae Clarke as the girl gives the best performance of her short but competent career. Forlorn but hardboiled, she remains plausible even when she has hysterics; in the scene with the soldier’s mother, she is curt and sullen instead of pathetic when she says: “I wanted you to know I could have married him.”

With Wanda Mansfield (now under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and Barbara Stanwyck (who is now being sued for breach of contract by Columbia), Mae Clarke was once a dancer at the Manhattan Everglades Club. A table for three in Manhattan’s Tavern restaurant was reserved for them daily. Cinemactress Clarke left the Everglades after a short appearance in The Noose to act in vaudeville. She married and divorced Vaudevillian Lew Brice, went to Hollywood two years ago. She lives with & supports her family which had financial difficulties when her father, a motion picture theatre organist, lost his job at the advent of the talkies.

The Spider (Fox). A man sitting in the audience of a vaudeville theatre is murdered. The performers in the theatre, a pair of magicians, are suspected of the crime and members of the audience are implicated. One of the magicians uses black magic and sleight-of-hand to find the real culprit. When The Spider was produced on the Manhattan stage four years ago, a fair proportion of the characters in it were seated in the pit of the theatre in which it was produced; this method of staging mystery plays became so popular that for a few months the lobbies of Manhattan’s theatres were infested with actors carrying concealed weapons and even the balconies resembled shooting galleries. In the cinema, obviously, no such presentation of The Spider was possible but it remains an exciting, gruesome and momentarily plausible dilemma, unfit for the hysterically inclined. In the cast, Edmund Lowe is the magician, Lois Moran the heroine, El Brendel a simple-minded spectator who provides comic relief by stealing a hat, asking stupid questions in a thick Swedish accent.

The Bargain (First National) is billed as a cinematic version of “Philip Barry’s Prize Play.” The award won by the play You and I on which The Bargain was based was but a minor trophy, from the Harvard “workshop” of Professor George Pierce Baker, in 1922. The Bargain sparkles intermittently with the witty insanity which is Author Barry’s chief contribution to letters and the screen. But it is plainly the product of a sophomore playwright. Its major originality is to show a father who has enriched himself in business, painfully disappointed when his son offers to give up an artistic career and enter the family soap firm. The son’s determination to enter business comes from lack of funds and a desire to marry, but the sacrifice of his esthetic ambition is made unnecessary when a picture painted by the father is judged bad enough to be used in an advertising campaign. Doris Kenyon and Lewis Stone perform ably as the middle-aged couple concerned, but whatever prizes accrue to the cinema should rightly be given to Funnyman Charles Butterworth. In the impersonation of a woebegone author, he states the story’s theme: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Later he makes soberly improper advances to a maidservant, meanders about at a fancy dress party in a Colonial costume and a wig which makes him look like George Arliss out of focus.

This Modern Age (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In this picture Joan Crawford, now completely a blonde, has the role of a tipsy virgin, a wholesome inebriate who. although often disorderly in an innocent way herself, is appalled when she learns that her mother, a divorcee whom she is visiting in Paris, is being kept by a wealthy Frenchman. When her fiance tells her about it she calls him a liar, neglects to apologize when she learns it is true. Before long a horrid scene occurs. Disgusted at her mother’s apparently inveterate immorality, the daughter takes up with a rounder who parades his bad intentions. Her fiance breaks into a room where they are reveling, pushes the rounder (Monroe Owsley) in his smirking weasel face, carries Joan Crawford downstairs.

There are so many able technicians in Hollywood that even pictures as uninspired as this one are generally built into reasonably inoffensive entertainment, unmarred by the ineptitudes which can make bad plays atrocities. There is nothing distinguished about This Modem Age but, like a medium-priced sedan, it runs rapidly and smoothly along, an inconspicuous mechanical marvel which disgraces no one and will probably make a profit. Joan Crawford’s new haircut, which gives the effect of a pale overgrown hedge straggling down the back of her neck, is not as unbecoming as it sounds. Good shots: Joan Crawford and Neil Hamilton (the fiance) dislodging a china vase and waiting for it to crash while it falls on a sofa. Trite shot: a scene of revelry which reaches its peak when Monroe Owsley tries to prove he is sober by walking in a straight line.

The Dreyfus Case (British International) relates, with few deviations from fact, the events which followed France’s conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894. The merits of the picture are, as they should be. more dramatic than didactic. It introduces with too much profusion and too little clarity the documents which lead to the conviction of Dreyfus but it is explicit in dealing with later developments of the case: the imprisonment of Dreyfus on Devil’s Island; the efforts of Emile Zola and others to establish his innocence; the trial of the real traitor, Major Esterhazy; the subsequent recall and rehabilitation of Dreyfus. The picture suffers from the technical weaknesses of most films manufactured in England but it recreates for its audiences the excitement which made the Dreyfus case a scandal, a tragedy and a political upheaval as well as a cause celebre. Good shot: Dreyfus (Cedric Hardwicke) having his buttons pulled off and his sword broken.