Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 11, 1937

You Only Live Once (United Artists). With a smuggled automatic in his hand and the prison doctor as hostage, Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is on his way out of the death house when his pardon arrives. Prison officials shriek the news at him. Eddie Taylor thinks their statement is a trick for his recapture. Too vivid in his mind is the manner in which he, innocent, was railroaded into his present plight. When the chaplain comes toward him in the fog, anxious to convince him that the pardon is authentic, Eddie shoots him. The chaplain stays on his feet long enough to call, “I’m not hit. Open the gates.” Thus is the structure-laid for a crescendo seldom excelled in hoodlum stories since Public Enemy. Within its tighter limits You Only Live Once has a signature of realism no less stark and confident than the famed Warner Bros, story. It presents in addition its own modest problem in sociology: has the State a right to punish a man for a crime committed due to pressure put upon him through a miscarriage of justice?Producer Walter Wanger leaves the conclusion to the audience, having arranged as a tacit persuader Eddie’s doomed and breath-taking flight toward the Canadian border with his wife, Joan (Sylvia Sidney). Justice works out a satisfactory answer, even though the trooper who marks Eddie with the cross hairs of his telescope sight, never pulls the trigger.

Proving that cinematic realism is an international language, Director Fritz Lang, an Austrian, gets an extraordinary authenticity of color into his quick episodic treatment of the life and love of Eddie Taylor. Many scenes, momentary on the screen, are hard to forget: the assault of a bank truck on a rainy day by a bandit with tear-gas bombs; the warped, animal hatred of the crowd watching Eddie being taken from the courtroom; the bullfrogs croaking in the pond outside the little inn from which, upon his wedding night, he is tossed out for being an ex-convict; a demonstration of the “electric eye” which detects metal objects upon prison visitors; Eddie and Joan talking through the visitors’ grill in the death house; the preparations for a transfusion to save Eddie’s life so that he can be electrocuted. For such things and the craftsmanship of Screen Writers Gene Towne and Graham Baker, Yon Only Live Once sets a pace which 1937 cops-&-robbers sagas may find hard to beat.

One in a Million (Twentieth Century-Fox J rates as a classic because it preserves for posterity the spectacle of Sonja Henie skating. Ten times (1927 to 1936) world, three times (1928, 1932, 1936) Olympic figure skating champion, Skater Henie is without doubt the best figure skater who ever lived. For her, the 80 standard figures on which figure skating is based are not a test of skill, but the vocabulary of a form of self-expression which for sheer elegance compares to ballet dancing as the ballet compares to the Lindy-hop. Skater Henie’s No. i specialty, as it was Dancer Anna Pavlova’s, is a swan dance. On the shrewd assumption that a cinema public which had never before investigated figure skating needed to be educated before witnessing the rarest flower of the art. Producer Darryl Zanuck insisted that she save it for a subsequent picture. What her cinema debut offers instead, in the interstices of a loosely woven story approximating Sonja Henie’s own biography, is a series of simple routines climaxed by newsreels of her winning performance at Garmisch in last year’s Winter Olympic Games. Superbly photographed by Cameraman Eddie Cronjager, earlier sequences of Skater Henie practicing for the Olympics on an Alpine pond, later ones of her leading an ice-ballet in Madison Square Garden, may be kindergarten to Skater Henie. Audiences are likely to find them the brilliant crystallization of a levitationist’s dream.

Sonja Henie contradicts not only the law of gravity but also the rule that women athletes are physically unsuited for roles as romantic heroines. A trim-figured blonde with brown eyes, plump cheeks, a dimpled smile, she fits with assurance into an anecdote—about a U. S. theatrical manager (Adolphe Menjou) on the lookout for new talent while touring the Alps with his own troupe—of which the chief virtue is the fact that it is not much impaired by interruptions. In addition to Sonja Henie’s skating, these include harmonica-tooting by Borrah Minnevitch & band, singing by Leah Ray, outrageous clowning by the Ritz Brothers.

Great Guy (Grand National) is James Cagney’s first picture for the up & coming young production company whose No. 1 box-office attraction he became after he broke with Warner Bros, last year. As such, it goes a long way to disprove the Hollywood theory that, given a free hand in selecting stories and casts, an actor’s vanity is sure to lead him astray. Great Guy is vintage Cagney, exhibiting him at all the shoulder-punching and sotto voce wisecracking on which was founded his reputation as the cinema’s No. i mick.

The decency of Great Guy is guaranteed by the fact that its hero, Johnny Cave, is an honest public official fighting a gang of political crooks. Johnny’s position on the side of law & order does not prevent him from using guttersnipe technique.

When a conniving ward leader suggests that Cave abuse his official power, he tosses his visitor’s hat out the window and his visitor out the door. Johnny’s love life is complicated by the fact that his fiancee (Mae Clarke) is the loyal secretary to the town’s worst scalawag (Henry Kolker).

The uneven course of their romance does net require Miss Clarke to function as target for Cagney’s grapefruit throwing, as she did in Public Enemy, but the affair is at least brightly controversial. When Johnny catches the ward leader and his fiancee’s boss trying to destroy evidence he has collected to show that both of them are grafters, the result is the most satisfying foot-&-fist work shown on the U. S.

screen since the Louis-Schmeling fight.

Johnny Cave renders their hulking gorilla (Joseph Sawyer) senseless with one punch, has the ringleader arrested, locks the police captain out of the room while he settles his old score with the ward leader by mopping up the floor with him.

In addition to delighting admirers of Actor Cagney, Great Guy, directed by John Blystone, produced by onetime Actor Douglas Maclean, sets the industry an example of what a young company can do by spending its money on good actors and good writing instead of big names, ponderous sets and over-pretentious publicity. Good shot: Johnny Cave’s ex-prizefighter, ex-bootlegger pal (Edward Brophy) amicably welcoming a dowager into his house by complimenting her on how much facial surgery has improved her appearance.

That Girl from Paris (RKO). Like

most Hollywood productions starring opera singers of established reputations, Soprano Lily Pons’s second cinema vehicle is really less a moving picture than a recorded concert with illustrations on the screen. As such it is satisfying entertainment. Vivacious little Diva Pons yodels a nameless vocal exercise, an adaptation of Panofka’s Tarantella, an Arthur Schwartz tune called Seal It With a Kiss and, for the inevitable climax on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the Una voce poco fa aria from The Barber of Seville, in which she turns loose the fastest high C yet released on a Hollywood sound track. All these correspond to the school figures of cine-musicomedy. The real pyrotechnics of That Girl from Paris come when Diva Pons puts classical touches on The Blue Danube to a background of swing jazz.

The result should qualify Composer Schwartz for some sort of award for the most satisfying musical novelty of 1936.

The story of That Girl from Paris, which it took four screenwriters to concoct, deals with the transatlantic romance between a Paris singer and a U. S. bandleader (Gene Raymond). Its real purpose —that of punctuating a series of closeups of the star which could be exciting only to her dentist—is transcended occasionally by moments of brash comedy contributed by the _ band’s mercurial drummer (Jack Oakie) and its sad-visaged Communist pianist (Mischa Auer).