The New Pictures: Dec. 21, 1936

Love in Exile (Gaumont-British) would greatly interest England’s onetime King Edward VIII, for it begins at the point which his career has just reached (see p. 15). Opening scene shows King Regis VI (Clive Brook) voluntarily abdicating the throne of an unnamed European nation because, 1) he is not allowed to marry a beautiful commoner named Madame Xandra St. Aurlon (Helen Vinson), and 2) because a powerful group wants to get its hands on the government. In this close parallel to the Simpson case, the powerful group is not a Cabinet, but two unscrupulous capitalists who covet oil concessions. They are busy installing a puppet dictator as Regis leaves for Zurich to meet Madame St. Aurlon. Feeling responsible for his loss of the throne, she goes into hiding. Regis then becomes a playboy. He cracks up in airplane races, drives a speedboat at Le Touquet, plays polo at Deauville. He takes up with women of the town, fends off U. S. debutantes, begs not to be addressed as “Your Majesty,” is called that anyway. He broods: “It’s strange . . . that one should learn how to rule after the chance of ruling has gone.” Finally he arrives on the Riviera with only his faithful valet and a few jewels left. Sent to pawn the jewels, the valet goes to Madame St. Aurlon, sells them to her, begs her to come back. Simultaneously the two unscrupulous businessmen, having trouble with their dictator, ask Madame St. Aurlon to persuade Regis to return to the throne. She flies to him at Cannes. After various vicissitudes, Regis successfully stages a coup d’état. Final scene shows him and his commoner “friend” standing on the palace balcony wildly cheered by the throng below.

Gaumont-British stoutly maintains that Love in Exile was adapted from Gene Markey’s story His Majesty’s Pyjamas, was made long before the producers heard of Mrs. Simpson. Aside from its topical interest, it is merely a mediocre melodrama.

Three Smart Girls (Universal). Under Carl Laemmle Sr., Universal Pictures Corp. made a specialty of horror pictures. Last spring when benign old “Uncle Carl,” who had generously padded his staff with relatives, sold the company he had founded, Banker John Cheever Cowdin and his associates, who bought it, promised profound changes. As an example of what to expect from an alert group of hard-boiled banker-showmen, Three Smart Girls should interest exhibitors. Universal’s most ballyhooed 1936 release is the daintiest, quaintest, most hygienic little musicomedy of the season, written, directed and performed with such evident sincerity that it may well be one of the box-office surprises of the year.

Frolicking happily by the shore of a Swiss lake, the Craig children, Penny (Deanna Durbin), Joan (Nan Grey) and Kay (Barbara Read), find their mother in tears over the news that their father, a New York banker, divorced ten years ago, is planning to marry again. Instead of laughing at this news as sophisticated children might well do, the small Craigs react like little Peppers. They decide the situation demands action. Borrowing fare from their nurse, they embark for New York, arrive when Judson Craig (Charles Winninger) is sitting down to lunch with his inamorata, Precious (Binnie Barnes). From the moment when the three little Craig girls dash into a hotel dining room to embarrass their father with cries of “Daddy,” his romance is doomed. When Judson Craig’s young assistant agrees that Precious and her mother (Alice Brady) are a mercenary pair, Joan Craig falls in love with him. When the assistant arranges to have a fake Czech count (Mischa Auer) pose as a millionaire decoy for Precious, a genuine English lord (Ray Milland) takes his place by accident, begins a romance with Kay Craig. It devolves on Penny to administer the knockout punch to her father’s mesalliance almost at the altar. She does it by running away, singing arias in a police station until the captain promises to help her.

That the successful efforts of three officious adolescents to reunite their middle-aged parents should be the basis of any cinema at all can be construed as a tribute to the open-mindedness of Universal’s Production Chief Charles R. Rogers. That the cinema involved should qualify as first-rate entertainment is a tribute to the finesse with which Director Henry Koster handled Adele Comandini’s script and to the acting of an expert and experienced supporting cast. That the heroine, instead of seeming an obnoxious little prig more terrifying than Boris Karloff in a fright-wig, possesses instead the appeal of a talented and attractive child is due principally to the actress who has now replaced Karloff as Universal’s outstanding attraction, 14-year-old Deanna Durbin.

Prettily dimpled, with a mature lyric soprano voice that made her a sensation on the radio when she sang on Eddie Cantor’s hour this autumn, Edna May Durbin was born in Winnipeg, brought up in Los Angeles where her father is a broker. She started taking singing lessons at 11. Last year her voice caught the ear of Hollywood Agent-Manager Jack Sherrill who put her under contract, got her a test with M-G-M for a picture that was never made. Her possibilities impressed Associate Producer Rufus LeMaire. When he joined Universal, he persuaded the new company to hire her, changed her name.

Whether Deanna Durbin will really be as much of a drawing card as Universal expects is currently as perplexing to Hollywood as whether she is its oldest child actress or its youngest adult star. Cinemactress Durbin, currently in New York on vacation, owns three pet turtles, a black dog named Tippy, collects paper matches for souvenirs. She takes singing lessons from Andres de Segurola, piano lessons from Frances Minnerick, schools with a tutor in the studio, is nicknamed “Candy,” likes to swim and ride. When she goes back to Hollywood she will live in a new house overlooking the Universal lot, with a bedroom walled in glass brick.

Banjo On My Knee (Twentieth Century-Fox) is, in a completely unpretentious fashion, a new kind of picture. It is a folk story about a group of Mississippi islanders so isolated that they regard land folk as belonging to another race, hold to the belief that “if God had intended people to live in towns He would have created towns the same way He made rocks and trees.” The folk story elements are as authentically saturated with mood as though this were serious drama instead of a light cinema with warmish music. What is most original about Banjo On My Knee is that the tunes never separate the story from its pattern but are cued in so as to help the feeling. It also permits able Helen Westley who, as a stand-by of the New York Theatre Guild, was noted for her interpretation of squalid roles, to reach a new low in this respect. A shabby pioneer in Green Grow the Lilacs, a harlot’s mother in They Shall Not Die, she appears in Banjo On My Knee as a superannuated female river-rat, mewing & spitting, scratching at her naked, knobbled feet.

Newt Holley (Walter Brennan) planned to serenade his son Ernie (Joel McCrea) and the latter’s bride Pearl (Barbara Stanwyck) with St. Louis Blues on their wedding night. He felt the tune might be a kind of charm to bring him a grandbaby. Newt never got to play the tune that night because Ernie ran away after he had knocked a man into the river for trying to kiss the bride.’ When Ernie finally came home again he quarreled so with Pearl that she went to New Orleans with an itinerant photographer (Walter Catlett). Following her to a cafe in which she had taken refuge from the photographer, Newt made a hit playing river music on his homemade one-man-band contraption. Pearl, following her husband’s second reappearance, was about to clear for Chicago with a crooner, and Ernie was on the brink of a new wedding with a river gal (Katherine DeMille) when Newt nailed Pearl and Ernie in the barge-boat cabin. At last he found reason to strike up St. Louis Blues. Best tunes: With a Banjo On My Knee, There’s Something in the Air. Best scene: Miss Stanwyck and the crooner sitting side by side, delivering monologs on their respective troubles, neither listening to the other. Best role: Buddy Ebsen as a river simpleton.

More Than a Secretary (Columbia) can best be diagnosed as a minor symptom of Columbia’s current attack of whimsey. To test the curriculum of her business school, Carol Baldwin (Jean Arthur) takes a job as secretary to Fred Gilbert (George Brent), carrot-nibbling editor of a health magazine. When she falls in love with Gilbert, Carol decides to humanize him. He proves the efficacy of her humanizing by falling in love, not with her but with her dullest pupil, Maizie (Dorothea Kent). Getting this situation straightened out involves some of the most uneven comedy dialog of the season. Sample, when Maizie is angling for a job on Body & Brain: “I can hear my mother say take good care of your body, Maizie, because it’s all you’ve got.”