Cinema: The New Pictures: Apr. 13, 1936

The Amateur Gentleman (Criterion). Hollywood producers who let Douglas Fairbanks Jr. go off to England to seek better roles and show what he knew about picture-making might do well to take a look at this sample of his ideas. The Amateur Gentleman set records in several London theatres. It was made by Fairbanks at the Gaumont plant, with money supplied by a London syndicate headed by Captain Alec Stratford Cunningham-Reid, rich, conservative M. P. from St. Marylebone. A large canvas of early 19th Century London, it preserves with florid elegance the swagger of its period. In the early 1800’s a man could be hanged for stealing thirteen pence. When Mr. Barty, a retired prizefighter turned innkeeper, is suspected of a theft far more serious, his son Barnabas (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) equips himself as a gentleman of quality, goes to look for the real culprit among the company that stayed at his father’s inn on the night of the trouble: Lady Cleone Meredith (Elissa Landi) ; her fortune-hunting fiance, Louis Chichester (Basil Sydney); her fop of a brother (Hugh Williams) and a lady who had been her fiancé’s mistress. The freeing of Barty Sr., the winning of Cleone and the expo sure of the thief who stole a fortune in pearls and banknotes from Lady Cleone’s grandfather is accomplished by some highly literate dramaturgy by Clemence Dane, some handsome snuff-taking by Fairbanks Jr., some capital period studies, including: 1) a bare-knuckle prizefight; 2) a Court cotillion; 3) a jailbreak; 4) a presentation of living tableaux from the paintings of the Royal Academy.

Big Brown Eyes (Paramount) presents a new kind of cinematic criminology and a new Joan Bennett. The criminology revolves around a private detective who found a margin of profits in his employment as a liaison between insurance companies and the underworld, from which the companies were interested in recovering stolen gems to obviate payments to their clients. Morey (Walter Pidgeon) is the private detective of Big Brown Eyes, working with an associate whose crimes include infanticide. The Big Brown Eyes are Eve’s (Joan Bennett), who has been transformed from a quiet type into a slangy manicurist whose assured deportment and reconditioned make-up make her virtually indistinguishable from Carole Lombard. The small blue eyes which Na ture gave her have been photographed with magenta lighting so as to look big and brown. The picture is paced in a fashion that makes the sensational crook melo dramas of last year seem as sedate as Whistler’s Mother. Its talk is spoken so fast and cut so close that quoters will have a hard time remembering the good lines, an even harder time picking out the bad ones. Sample routine: Eve, taken out of a barber shop and given a job on a news paper, forces a crook to tell who killed the baby by publishing the statement that he has told all, thus making him afraid he will be executed as a squealer by his onetime pals if he leaves jail, whose protection is refused him unless he does tell all.

The Unguarded Hour (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an elaborate demonstration of the not particularly startling hypothesis that any man’s life contains moments when his whereabouts, if later questioned, would be hard to prove. Lady Dearden (Loretta Young) agrees to pay a blackmailer £2,000 for letters written by Sir Alan Dearden (Franchot Tone) to his onetime mistress. At her rendezvous with the blackmailer Lady Dearden encounters two tourists. When, with Sir Alan Dearden as prosecutor, one of the tourists goes on trial for pushing the other one off a cliff, this chance meeting makes Lady Dearden a key witness; but because her testimony would reveal her deal with the blackmailer, she postpones giving it. When she finally talks in court, it not only frees the prisoner at the bar but puts her husband in his place. When his onetime mistress has been murdered, circumstantial evidence, much like that on which he based his case against the innocent tourist, is definitely against Sir Alan. The extortion plot supplies a motive. It takes the best efforts of Lady Dearden, her astute confidant (Roland Young) and the head of Scotland Yard (Lewis Stone) to extricate him, put the blame where it belongs. For a melodrama containing two violent deaths, The Unguarded Hour is chiefly remarkable for an inappropriate placidity which Franchot Tone’s yawnings, head scratchings and frowns to denote the weight of great affairs do little to dispel. Best shot: Roland Young christening a baby.

The Singing Kid (Warner). Cinemaddicts for whom Warner Brothers musicals have hitherto been trademarked by the presence of Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Guy Kibbee and Frank McHugh, may well rub their eyes to discover herein such novelties as Negro Bandmaster Cab Calloway, the Yacht Club Boys, a British-sounding ingenue named Beverly Roberts and a 6-year-old moppet called Sybil Jason, imported from Capetown by way of London. Among child actresses, Sybil Jason is to Shirley Temple as Jean Harlow is to Ann Harding: less whole some but more refreshing. She made her stage debut at 3. doing imitations of Greta Garbo in English vaudeville. As a contract actress at Warners, she has been held in minor roles to permit her to “develop.” Her current appearance is supposed to whet the appetite of cinemaddicts for her first starring vehicle, Everybody’s Sweetheart, to be produced this spring.

Unfortunately, even a galaxy of new talent plus Actress Keeler’s husband, Al Jolson, cannot entirely disguise the fact that, aside from its personnel. The Singing Kid sticks with alarming fidelity to the tradition of its predecessors. Its story runs to formula. A song & dance man (Jolson) loses girl, money, voice, regains the latter two under the impetus of fresh romance. Production numbers, with the exception of one in which the Yacht Club Boys heckle Jolson for his Mammy songs, have a warmed-over air. As entertainment, it boils down to a simple question of taste: Is Jolson’s hoarse, good-humored style of putting over a song as acceptable to cinemaddicts now as it was eight years ago when he used it to launch an era of enter tainment in the first talkie ever made, The Jazz Singer? Best songs: I Love to Singa, You’re the Cure for What Ails Me by Jolson, and My, How This Country’s Changed by the Yacht Club Boys.