Cinema: The New Pictures: Nov. 9, 1931

The Sin of Madelon Claudet (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is remarkable because in it Helen Hayes appears in cinema for the first time and because it succeeds in its intention—to make audiences weep.

The story contains much familiar pathos. It is about a French peasant girl who devotes her life to supporting an illegitimate son. First she takes up with a successful Parisian thief (Lewis Stone). When the thief is arrested, she is sent to jail as his accomplice. She leaves her son to be reared in a state institution and when she gets out, earns the money for his further education by harlotry. By the time she is ready to apply for lodging in the poorhouse, he is a successful young physician. Climax: she goes to his house to have a last look at him. Entirely too proud to tell who she is, she chuckles when he discovers in her traces of disease, looks worried when he suspects her of wanting to steal from its frame a picture of herself as a young girl.

By ceasing entirely to be Helen Hayes and becoming instead the woman whose life story she portrays, Cinemactress Hayes makes the familiarity of the story double its sadness. As a young girl, she is gay and tender; as a jailbird, she chatters to a friend (Marie Prevost) about her son; as a prostitute, she squeals for money in barrooms and drums up her trade without ever making the error of playing for the audience’s sympathy. The picture is well directed by Edgar Selwyn, splendidly acted by the rest of the cast—particularly by Jean Hersholt as an old physician who, towards the end of the picture, meets Madelon Claudet running away from her son’s house.

On the stage, Helen Hayes’s greatest success was Coquette. The run of that play was terminated by a celebrated act of God—the birth of Helen Hayes’s daughter—over which there was an Actors Equity suit. Her husband. Playwright Charles MacArthur (see The Unholy Garden) worked up the script of Madelon Claudet (from the stage play The Lulla-by). A jolly, practical jokester, he once wrote a speech abusing drama critics, gave it to his wife to read over the radio when it was too late for her to change. Helen Hayes is two years younger than the 20th Century; the make-up that causes her to look 70 in this picture took an hour to apply. She made her first stage appearance at nine. Her recitations in convent school so impressed James Cardinal Gibbons that, by quoting his approval, she was able to persuade her family to let her act. She says: “I was born lucky and energetic. . . . I’m the only actress who has never written a play. I take pencils and pads . . . always end by drawing pictures. . . . “

The Unholy Garden (United Artists). Ronald Colman is the cinemactor who exemplifies romantic savoir faire. His admirers are pleased to note that no situation causes him to lose his deliberated calm, his air of graceful self-sufficiency. Colman’s qualifications, together with Estelle Taylor’s expert impersonation of a lush and crafty siren, comprise the chief virtues of The Unholy Garden. The story is by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who were unsure whether they were writing comedy or melodrama and did neither vigorously.

To provide a background for Colman’s savoir faire, Hecht & MacArthur made him a patrician burglar seeking what seems a most unlikely sanctuary in a ruined castle on the Algerian desert. He reaches this stronghold by making off with a fancy auto in which Estelle Taylor had hoped to haul him off to the authorities, for a reward. Among the denizens of the ruined castle —a doctor who has murdered three wives and uses the skull of one for an ash tray; a blood-thirsty colonel; an aged, blind embezzling financier—Colman enjoys a badman’s holiday. He plots with his confreres to steal the funds which the embezzling financier has secreted on the premises. When he has done so, he gives most of the money away to a tattered virgin (Fay Wray) who describes herself as a “desert Cinderella” and seems to have gotten into the picture when no one was looking. The Unholy Garden has the defect of implausibility but it is not wholly stupid. Good shot: Colman reproving an Algerian servitor who licks his chops when announcing that a lady wishes to see him.

The Yellow Ticket (Fox). Balancing the propaganda of imported cinemas which show the Utopian workings of the Five-Year Plan, U. S. producers often display Russia, most frequently pre-revolution Russia, as a hobgoblin empire in which misery had plenty of company and none of the inhabitants was more than one step removed from the Siberian salt-mines. The Yellow Ticket, an estimable antiquity, full of perils for Elissa Landi, shows what might have happened in old Russia when a young girl took it into her head to pay a visit to her convict father.

Being a Jewess, she is unable to secure a passport. Instead, she secures a prostitute’s license. When she arrives at the jail where her father is confined, she finds him dead. She is then subjected to the insults of the secret police and the leering advances of a Baron Andrey (Lionel Barrymore). Further and even more desperate consequences of her junket are imminent until she makes good friends with a British journalist (Laurence Olivier) and, by virtue of what she can tell him about the technique of the secret police, becomes his secretary. When the journalist’s revelations imperil his life, there occurs the scene in which Elissa Landi, imprisoned in the Baron’s chambers, is informed by him that “we must all make sacrifices for those we love.” Every heroine’s Samaritanism has some limits. Elissa Landi shoots the Baron, escapes with the journalist in the opportune confusion caused by the first day of the War.

This grim but lively melodrama, even more than her earlier vehicles (Always Goodby, Wicked) shows the potentialities of Elissa Landi as an emotional actress. A stage success of 17 years ago, the picture has two other noteworthy performances—by Laurence Olivier, a mild spoken English actor with unusually good camera presence, and Lionel Barrymore. Barrymore, the best leerer in his family, achieves facial contortions of unparalleled eloquence; he has added a scratchy guffaw to his paraphernalia of lechery. Good shot: the scene in a cabaret in which a song sung by the performers reminds Barrymore where he first saw Elissa Landi.