Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 21, 1932

The New Pictures

The Beast of the City (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Partly because of protests from the Hays organization, 1932 gangster pictures will show criminals as craven rather than heroic. Cinema police, like Walter Huston in this picture, will be clever and courageous instead of timid nincompoops. But it is unlikely that even these thoughtful improvements will instill respect for law & order into cinemaddicts so long as the underworld, however deplorable, is displayed as brilliantly efficient. In this picture, almost all the admirable members of the police department of an anonymous city are destroyed in their effort to capture one small nest of desperadoes who are handicapped by drink. Nor is this the only respect in which malfeasance is shown to have advantages over civic virtue. The members of the gang are able to associate with Jean Harlow which, to a village audience, should sufficiently excuse their defections. The chief of police has vowed to sanitate the town and he is well on his way to do so when his young brother (Wallace Ford), Cajoled by Jean Harlow, neglects the obligations of his detective’s badge so far as to help two gangsters rob a bank. He and his accomplices are captured but they “beat the rap.” The young brother is then so much ashamed of himself that he offers to betray the gang. This leads to the climactic scene in which revolvers pop for two minutes and a half, killing most of the major members of the cast except Jean Harlow.

When Miss Harlow recently set out to make a personal appearance tour, Loew’s Inc. published a 28-page brochure on the subject, rehearsing the familiar milestones in her career. She started life 21 years ago as Harlean Carpenter in Kansas City, Mo. She was married at 16, divorced last year. She got her first important part when Howard Hughes, remaking Hell’s Angels as a talking picture, gave her Greta Nissen’s role. In effect, Jean Harlow is a shiny refinement of Clara Bow. She is a competent though not a brilliant actress. Her contours are luxurious though slender; her face childish but engaging. Her most obvious and enticing quality is the peculiar pale thatch on top of her head. It got her her first part in the cinema, when a director noticed her standing outside a Kansas City drugstore. It caused her pressagent to invent the phrase “platinum blonde.” It also caused a major revival of the hair-bleaching industry. Jean Harlow has had a larger influence on the trade of beauticians and the habits of their customers than any other cinemactress in the last two years. Because its ivory-colored covering soils so easily, Jean Harlow washes her head with soap and a few drops of bluing, every other day. She detests exercise, has a masseuse preserve her figure. She wears low-cut gowns but travels with her mother and remarks: “Sex appeal should be a subtle quality so I wear black a good deal.”

The Lost Squadron (RKO), instead of being about flyers in the War, is about flyers performing in a cinema about flyers in the War. While not exactly a breath-taking stroke of originality, this helps give The Lost Squadron a freshness of viewpoint which informs even the routine stretches of the picture. It also permits the inclusion of one character almost entirely new to the cinema: a violent, loudly clothed, arrogantly posturing Hollywood director. The behavior of this director and his name—Von Furst—suggest that he might have been patterned after Director Erich Von Stroheim. In appearance Von Furst and Von Stroheim are identical, for Von Stroheim plays the role, with obvious relish. Before assuring his actors that they are addle-headed and incompetent, he removes his checked coat, folds it carefully and throws it on the ground. He twists his leading lady’s wrists when he suspects her of liking one of his stunt flyers and then rubs corrosive acid on the control wires of that pilot’s plane. At this point, the esprit de corps of the stunt flyers*—three pilots who belonged to the same unit in France—reasserts itself. One (Robert Armstrong) against whom the director has no grudge, takes off in the damaged plane. The one (Richard Dix) whom the director hoped to kill, follows him in a sound machine. The third (Joel McCrea) stays on the ground, threatening the director with firearms.

The Lost Squadron is the first picture manufactured by RKO since young David Selznick became production head of RKO-Radio and RKO-Pathe. It will be to the advantage of all concerned if the picture is typical of forthcoming RKO products. Good shot: a group of assistant directors, script writers, prop boys and cameramen waiting to start work, with Von Stroheim standing above them, on a pedestal beside the camera, bawling orders.

Dancers in the Dark (Paramount). Blonde Miriam Hopkins makes her living by cavorting in a 10¢ dance hall. When partners are scarce, she entertains the customers by crooning. Her promiscuous past, well-known to practically every member of the orchestra, does not prevent its chief saxophone player (William Collier Jr.) from proposing marriage. Complication is injected when the band leader (Jack Oakie), long a friend of Collier, tries to break up the union. Action is kept at a swift pace by lust, robbery, off-stage murder and, finally, the shooting of Oakie by a gun-toting habitue of the dance hall (George Raft). Good shot: Miss Hopkins, eyes half shut, singing “St. Louis Blues” while the ten-centers wiggle according to dance hall form.

The Passionate Plumber (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The combination of Jimmy Durante and Buster Keaton in this picture (faintly derived from Her Cardboard Lover, which Leslie Howard and the late Jeanne Eagels acted on the stage) works out well. Durante is worried about his huge and remarkable nose. The nose is worried by the other characters who tweak it, pinch it, slam doors against it. Durante is an urbane but eccentric chauffeur who speaks French with a Brooklyn accent. He gets a chance to use his favorite word when Polly Moran, as a maidservant, rebuffs him with the door. ”You may think that mortifies me,” cries Durante. “It spurs me on, it spurs me on!”

Keaton. imperturbable in situations which could not happen elsewhere than in the Paris of cinema comedies, is a Yonkers plumber who has strayed abroad with his kit of tools. Called upon to fix a bathroom belonging to the heroine (Irene Purcell), he stays on at her request to help her control her infatuation for a cad (Gilbert Roland). Keaton manages to follow her into a swank gaming house but when he pulls a handkerchief from his rented evening clothes, mothballs fall into the roulette wheel. He calls himself, not a gigolo, but a “juggler,” says it is his job to “make women want other men more.” A large amount of bric-a-brac in the room where part of the action occurs gives a clue to the grand scene at the finish. Plates, pots, vases, statues, lamps and chandeliers are shattered over the head of Cad Roland, while Durante watches, with his nose to a keyhole. Director Edward Sedgwick made The Passionate Plumber raucous, rapid and amusing. Good shot: Keaton wriggling out of an embarrassing situation with the heroine by posing as a physician, examining her abdomen with pliers and a suction cup for his stethoscope.

* Part of the actual stunt flying necessary to the manufacture of The Lost Squadron was done uy the late Leo Nomis. One of Hollywood’s four most famed stunt flyers, he crashed last month while making a scene for Sky Brides.