Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 22, 1937

Ready, Willing and Able (Warner).

Pinky (Lee Dixon) and Barry (Ross Alexander—) trade the songs they write for tailoring service, even piano rental, until a producer putting on Broadway shows with Hollywood backing is willing to advance $50,000 for their masterpiece, Fair Lady, provided they can sign the English singer, Jane Clarke (Winifred Shaw) for the lead. The anxiety of Agent J. Van Courtland (Allen Jenkins) to get 10% of Jane’s $1,500 weekly salary leads him to sign up the wrong Jane Clarke (Ruby Keeler). This Jane, neither English nor a singer, accepts the misrepresentation because it offers her an opportunity to capitalize her talent for dancing and because, though naughty, its consequences are nicer than the other two things she could do: 1) go back to school, or 2) marry an awful fellow (Comedian Hugh O’Connell).

Developing thereafter along conventional lines, Ready, Willing and Able provides a good-humored framework for some smash songs by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting, some expert tap dancing by Keeler and Dixon. Nobody in the cast has a reputation that demands dignified behavior, so even the writers seem to be having a marvelous time. It is the type of screen play which opens with the male leads doing a number without trousers and in which Comics Fazenda and O’Connell make their last exit walking absentmindedly into a lion truck.

The Warner Bros, junior cinemusical company has a picnic with the slapdash, rapid lines, but there is nothing slapdash about the glittering specialties or the skilful, engaging music. Top song and top production number: Too Marvelous for Words. Swing High, Swing Low (Paramount) reveals the effects of outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows upon the soul of a sensitive hot-trumpet player. Mustered out of the U. S. Army in Panama, Skid Johnson (Fred MacMurray) is not much better than a guttersnipe when he meets Maggie King (Carole Lombard), a stranded dancer working as a manicurist. Things begin to improve when he and Maggie team in an act, celebrate its sensational success by marriage, improve even further when a Broadway scout (Charles Arnt) offers Skid a contract. In New York, Skid behaves badly. He not only neglects to send Maggie, waiting in Panama, the fare to follow him, but also takes up with a night club jade (Dorothy Lamour), in whose room he drunkenly answers the telephone the night Maggie finally arrives. Maggie divorces him. Skid disintegrates. He wobbles back to the gutter, gets turned down when he tries to reenlist, finally gets one more chance to play his trumpet in an orchestra run by a kind-hearted crony (Charles Butterworth). He is on the point of fumbling this assignment also when Maggie, still loyal, reappears, sobers him up enough to render their old specialty.

Loosely adapted from Watters & Hopkins’ play, Burlesque, which ran on Broadway in 1927, Swing High, Swing Low somehow fails to give the spectacle of a wind instrument expert keeping a stiff upper-lip the emotional intensity which it no doubt deserves. Songs like Panamania and I Hear a Call to Arms, by Al Siegel and Sam Coslow, are appealing but hardly likely to be rated as classics by addicts of swing music. Vastly over-ballyhooed by Paramount, the picture’s chief virtues are providing pretty Carole Lombard with a few comedy lines almost up to the standard of the ones she had in My Man Godfrey; and reminding cinemaddicts that Fred MacMurray, who can really play a trombone, got his start in cinema after a five-year career as a member of the California Collegians. Most maudlin shot: Skid’s response to the information that Maggie is going to leave him—tooting Mendelssohn’s Wedding March discordantly in a hotel corridor.

Razumov (Andre Daven) is a French production with English subtitles of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, which was published in 1911 when the terrorism of Nihilists and Anarchists in Russia was capturing popular imagination. Razumov (Pierre Fresnay) is a Russian student with no interest in politics and on the verge of a brilliant scholastic career when he finds a boyhood friend named Haldin (Jean-Louis Barrault) hiding in his rooms after assassinating the Prime Minister. Unwillingly stirred by sympathy, Razumov tries to help Haldin escape, but is trapped into betraying him. Tsarist police then force him to become their tool among the other conspirators, who think Razumov a hero because he gave shelter to Haldin. With the only alternatives dishonor or death, the tortured student finally makes his choice.

Joseph Conrad has been mangled by many U. S. and British cinemen who customarily utilize the melodrama to the exclusion of the nobility in his novels.

Razumov, brilliantly acted, majestically directed and full of the sombre, malevolent tragedy Continental cinemen depict so ably, does not repeat an old shortcoming.

Tsar to Lenin (Max Eastman-Herman Axelbank). An amateur photographer, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia amused him self one summer afternoon in 1913 by snapping his guests and letting them snap him in and about his swimming pool at Livadia. Intended for the royal album, these naive shots turned up last week un der very different surroundings — the screen of New York’s Filmarte Theatre, as part of a seven-reel documentary film tracing Russia’s history through the War and the 1917 Revolution. Assembled on the general lines of Laurence Stallings’ The First World War (1934), Tsar to Lenin consists principally of old newsreels intelligently fitted together by Her man Axelbank, who spent 13 years collecting them, and Writer Max Eastman, whose commentary accompanies them.

Trotskyist Eastman sees to it that his hero gets into as many scenes as possible, includes only one shot of Stalin. Far greater than its significance as Trotskyist propaganda however is the Tsar to Lenin’?, importance as one more striking testimonial to the screen’s potential value as a medium for revitalizing history.

Tsar to Lenin starts with a shot of Nicholas II and his four daughters who wear feathered hats, ends with a close-up of Lenin in 1921. Between the two, it assembles an extraordinarily complete record of major happenings, catches the spirit of ten incredible years. Best shots: palace guards helping the 10-year-old Tsarevitch mount his horse; Petrograd crowds tossing bouquets at Kerensky; an unidentified Bolshevik soldier smiling at his White firing squad.

*Who last month killed himself in the barn back of his home at Van Nuys, (Los Angeles) Calif.