Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 23, 1933

Tillie and Gus (Paramount). Tillie (Alison Skipworth) is the dilapidated proprietress of a waterfront gambling house in China. Gus (W. C. Fields) is a down-at-heels Alaskan gambler, who has just escaped being lynched for murder. Long since divorced, Gus and Tillie are reunited by the terms of Tillie’s brother’s will: he bequeaths them an antique mortgage-ridden ferryboat. Living on the boat when Tillie and Gus come to claim it are Tillie’s niece (Jacqueline Wells), her husband and an imperturbable infant (Baby LeRoy). It becomes necessary, in order to thwart a rival ferryboat operator, for Fields, Skipworth, Wells and gurgling LeRoy to win a race in the Keystone in the course of which LeRoy falls overboard in a washtub and Fields stokes the boilers with boxes of roman candles. Part parody of Tugboat Annie, part pure farce, Tillie and Gus is one of the pleasanter chapters in the long and happy career of W. C. Fields’s famed unlighted cigar. Baby LeRoy, now 19 months old, has taken up walking since his first picture, A Bedtime Story, but remains incapable of speech. To make him cry, his director orders Baby LeRoy to blow his nose. He has the longest contract without options in Hollywood ; it was signed by his grand mother because his widowed mother, Mrs. LeRoy Winebrenner of Altadena, Calif., was only 16. Actor LeRoy works two hours a day, in seven-minute intervals. At 10:30 a. m. he takes a nap. Like most featured players he has two “stand-ins”‘ (understudies) to take his place on the set while lights and props are being ar ranged. He likes baked potatoes, butter, spinach, zwieback, watches that have a loud tick. He distrusts W. C. Fields. His next picture will be Mrs. Fane’s Baby Is Stolen, specially written for him by George Washington’s debunker, Rupert Hughes. Bombshell (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Lola Burns (Jean Harlow) has a mop of platinum blonde hair, a four-post bed in a lacquer white bedroom, a fat contract with Monarch Pictures. She has a thieving secretary, a vulgar, fatuous father, a brother so stupid that it is impossible to tell when he is drunk and three miraculously fluffy old English sheepdogs. Bombshellexhibits a few significant incidents in Lola Burns’s ecstatically awful life. Pursued by a marquis, an over-virile director and a wild-eyed studio publicity man named Space Hanlon (Lee Tracy), Lola’s life is really no more than a negative for her pictures, a high-speed press for headlines. Hanlon has the marquis arrested for not renewing his passport; Lola gets the director to put up the bail. Before the screamer headlines on the first story have time to cool, Hanlon arranges for count and director to come to blows at Lola’s house. The fight not only produces more headlines; it thwarts Lola’s scheme, which Hanlon thinks might dull her lurid reputation, to adopt a baby, because it scandalizes the lady inspectors from the orphan asylum. When she makes up her mind to run away from it all, there comes into Lola’s life, with a suddenness that she fails to find suspicious, something beautiful. He is Gifford Middleton of the Boston Middletons. He tells her that her hair is like a field of silver daisies. Lola is broken-heartedwhen her father and brother spoil the Middleton romance by scandalizing the Middleton parents—until it turns out that all the Middletons are really down-at-heel actors hired to shame Lola into going back to work. She does not find time to be mystified by discovering that even true love for her is merely one more publicity stunt. She is nestling nervously in HanIon’s arms when the picture ends. Bombshell is, besides acid farce and firecracker satire, something like an inspired lunatic’s self-diagnosis. Lola is not really Jean Harlow, not even the Harlow of un-happy gossip, but she is enough like her impersonator to make it hard sometimes to see where reality ends and the impersonation starts. Director Victor Fleming and his adaptors, John Lee Mahin and Jules Furthman, must have enjoyed puttingthe final gloss of ambiguity on this picture, with touches like a squabble on a set for Jean Harlow’s Red Dust; mention of a letter to “our casting director Ben Veranda” when MGM’s real casting director is Ben Piazza; an advertisement for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s “star power” in the one truly sad line in Bombshell, Lola’s gulping epitaph for her grand passion: “Not even Norma Shearer or Helen Hayes, in their nicest pictures, were ever spoken to like that.” The Way to Love (Paramount). The story of this picture is the story really of all Maurice Chevalier musicomedies. It starts with a burst of song integrated with action, building up to a shot of Chevalier in straw hat and dilapidated clothes, grinning and singing. There follows the scene in the eccentric little shop, this time a shop for dispensing aid of all kinds to harassed lovers; the difficult evasion of the shopkeeper’s country niece who has a large dowry; the romance, beset with difficulties, with a waif of the Paris streets (Ann Dvorak). What makes The Way to Love different from most Chevalier pictures is a quality of light poetic humor in the writing. The great, the consuming ambition of Chevalier in this picture is to be a guide to Paris. He is first shown listening with intense disgust to an ordinary guide’s harangue on the steps of Notre Dame, then explaining, with music and gestures, how the job should have been done. You share his distress at hearing a hack perform a job which for him would have been an avocation. The minor characters in The Way to Love are imagined with perverse and delicate wit. M. Bibi (Edward Everett Horton), Chevalier’s employer, is a severe, nervous, gay old gentleman who, when he has quarreled with his wife, invents with Chevalier a game of checkers played with liqueur glasses, then develops a passion for chopping off neckties. Even more extraordinary is Mme Bibi’s niece. She is a country wench so neurotic about marriage that merely to pronounce the word causes her to claw the face of the speaker with nervous hootings. Chevalier makes love to his Madeleine while her profile is being dangerously sketched by her guardian, a professional knife thrower. Ever in My Heart (Warner). The fact that Barbara Stanwyck is an emotional actress of considerable skill causes her employers to select for her sad stories of the death of babies and similar sentimentalhashish. Ever in My Heart is the old one about the girl who married a German professor just before the War. Their baby dies early in the picture but the real punch comes, as you might expect, when Mary Wilbrandt (Miss Stanwyck) meets her Hugo (Otto Kruger) in France, when she is a U. S. canteen worker and he is a German spy. Good sequence: a troupe of street boys planning to stone the Wilbrandts’ dachshund.