Cinema: The New Pictures: May 10, 1937

Turn Off The Moon (Paramount), first effort of cinema’s only woman producer, Mrs. Fanchon Simon, was not planned in the grand manner. By all the gauges Hollywood uses to measure a picture’s importance, such as cast names, expensive sets and the fame of writers and directors, it should have remained merely a modest little musical for double bills. By a rare cinematic accident, it successfully refutes its sales bracket. Its gags and tunes are good, its patter fast. Above all it has the unprefigured value which is generated in a musical when most of the participants are young enough to enjoy their opportunities with relish and when the proceedings are not grave enough to numb them with anxiety concerning the results.

Elliott Dinwiddy (Charles Ruggles) runs his department store and his love life at the dictates of the constellations. Both face a crisis when Dinwiddy learns from his astrologer (Andrew Tombes) that for the first time in 15 years his horoscope is right for a proposal of matrimony to his secretary. Myrtle Tweep (Marjorie Gateson). His success, from a planetary point of view, depends upon his bringing together before midnight, a pair of youthful lovers. Dinwiddy’s attention settles on a cirl, Caroline Wilson (Eleanore Whitney) who, hiding in the honeymoon cottage in the furniture department when the store detective chases her for doughnut stealing, has begun a romance with a sheet music salesman, Terry Keith (Johnny Downs). Obstacles to their coalition and therefore to Tweep’s and Dinwiddy’s are: 1) efforts of Store Manager Truelove Spencer (Grady Sutton) to annex the girl himself; 2) Miss Tweep’s cynical attitude toward astrology; 3) Dinwiddy’s inability to establish his identity when arrested, drunk, for breaking up the sporting goods department with a shotgun. Love and astrology are finally correlated at a store party, assisted by music from Phil Harris & Kenny Baker, a lovely dance by Miss Whitney and some low camera ballet legs. Best bit part: Romo Vincent’s imitation of Charles Laughton.

Producer Fanchon, 42, was Fanny Wolf, daughter of a Los Angeles clothing store proprietor. She studied piano; her brother Mike (Marco) fiddle. Together they entertained at lodge parties and picnics, graduated to a dinner show in Tait’s famed San Francisco restaurant. Fanchon & Marco embellished their act with other specialties, began to play theatre dates in their spare time. When the demand grew they organized a second company, coalesced their troupe in a musical show Sunkist which they took to Broadway. Two weeks later the Southern Pacific Railroad accepted Marco’s note for $2,800 to transport the company back to San Francisco. The note was paid out of profits from the original San Francisco units. Soon the S. P. was transporting Fanchon & Marco’s show up and down the west coast, then it was going all over the U. S.—52 units a year. For the young Wolfs had had a bright idea. Small cinema houses wanted to stage shows but could not afford them. Fanchon & Marco offered units at a reasonable price, equipped them and rehearsed them in Hollywood, sent them out complete with costumes, scenery and songs. Their studio on Sunset Boulevard near Western became a factory for mass production of 15-minute shows. They needed bright youngsters who would work cheap. Janet Gaynor swung on a chandelier from the stage of Loew’s State in Los Angeles; Myrna Loy’s rice-powdered legs pranced in many a chorus; Bing Crosby, shaking with stage fright, croaked Mississippi Mud. A buxom girl soprano who had worked with them in Tait’s signed a Metropolitan opera contract in a round, florid hand: Mary Lewis. Others who drew Fanchon & Marco checks were Martha Raye, June Knight, Mitchell & Durant, Eleanore Whitney, Johnny Downs.

Fanchon was the creative brains of the outfit. She built her whole show around some novel production number, blending costumes and tunes to whatever the girls were doing. They came out on bicycles, skates and skis. They wore bunny costumes, appeared disguised as flowers, birds or animals. Fanchon & Marco, Inc. snowballed until theatres which had bought franchises from them became bankrupt and in order to keep units out they had to become theatre operators. Fanchon & Marco shrank from 52 units a year to two units a month.

Fanchon is married to William H. Simon, proprietor of a string of Los Angeles dairy lunches. They have adopted two children. She is a tall woman with aquiline features and wild hair who, like many over-energetic people, walks with a shuffle. She admires Strindberg’s plays, feels that men make better actors than women and that her sex has little place in the production end of show business. “Once a woman stops being feminine, people don’t like to have her around.” Her present deal is the result of an interview with Adolph Zukor in which she presented an idea for making her own pictures for Paramount release. Zukor persuaded her to produce with studio money.

Shall We Dance? (RKO). Since any picture concerning Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is largely an excuse for them to dance together, one gauge of such a picture’s merit is the speed with which this excuse is forthcoming. The plot of Shall We Dance? is so involved that the picture is almost half over before they dance together. Once it starts, Astaire & Rogers are well up to their par and most cinemaddicts will doubtless consider it well worth waiting for.

This time Astaire is Petroff, a ballet dancer who falls in love with Linda Keene (Ginger Rogers), a tap dancer. Because of the unique means Petroff selects to meet his inamorata, a set of misunderstandings begins which brings into action an ocean liner, a pack of dogs, an airplane, a marriage for business reasons, an absent-minded impresario (Edward Everett Horton), an oily hotel manager (Eric Blore) and a scheming noblewoman (Ketti Gallian) before the two dancers arrive in each other’s arms for good.

Best dances: Astaire solo in a mechanistic routine in the ship’s engine room; Astaire & Rogers plus a masked chorus from which she is almost indistinguishable; Astaire & Rogers on roller skates in Central Park. Best tunes in the slick George & Ira Gershwin score: They All Laughed, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off.

Night Must Fall (Metro-Goldwyn Mayer). Any moving picture in which the hero is an egocentric murderer and in which the action consists of his efforts to conceal one brutal crime while preparing for another, comes under the head of a daring cinematic experiment. Any picture in which Robert Montgomery, whose previous contribution to the screen has been a seven-year marathon of ingenuous charm, gives a first-rate performance in a difficult role, rates as at least a major surprise. Night Must Fall, adapted from the play which Emlyn Williams wrote and acted for a year in London and two months in Manhattan (TIME, Oct. 12), scores on both counts, easily the most interesting item in the year’s cinema file on criminology.

Danny (Montgomery), brash young page boy at an English inn, turns up in the tidy cottage where Mrs. Bramson (Dame May Whitty) lives with her niece Olivia (Rosalind Russell) the day the police are combing the woods for the body of a woman who has mysteriously disappeared. Mrs. Bramson, a doddering hypochondriac, has sent for Danny to rebuke him for misbehavior with her maidservant, but before he leaves, his aggressive understanding of her symptoms induces her to hire him as a male nurse and companion. When Danny moves in, the most noteworthy item in his luggage is an old-fashioned hatbox just about big enough to hold a human head. When the corpse the police are looking for is found without one, the suspicions which Danny’s over-solicitude for her aunt have aroused in Olivia begin to be a ghastly certainty.

Neither detective story nor melodrama, Night Must Fall is concerned not with how Olivia arranges Danny’s undoing but how he nearly arranges hers. Instead of sending her scuttling to the police, Olivia’s growing awareness that Danny has killed one woman and is planning to kill another gives him a fascination for her which, when a curious police inspector is examining the hatbox, makes her remove it before he gets a chance to look inside. Horrified at her reactions, more and more drawn to Danny, Olivia twice tries to run away but comes back both times. The second time is the night that Danny does away with Mrs. Bramson.

John Van Druten’s screen play, Richard Thorpe’s direction and a more flexible medium combine to remove the faint creakiness that Night Must Fall had on the stage, make it a powerfully striking example of how a mood of horror can be created by understatement. Good shot: Olivia courteously giving Danny the price tag which she has just removed from the shawl he is presenting to Mrs. Bramson as an heirloom, from his mother.

Cafe Metropole (Twentieth Century-Fox). When the suave proprietor (Adolphe Menjou) of the Paris cafe where she is dining with her father and aunt tells her that a Russian prince, Alexis Panaieff, requests the honor of being presented to her, Laura Ridgeway (Loretta Young) is delighted. She recognizes the prince (Tyrone Power) as a young American whom she has encountered once before, and when his preposterous Russian accent makes it doubly clear that he is an impostor, she decides definitely to marry him. What Laura does not know is that marrying her is Prince Alexis’ job, assigned to him by the rascally proprietor to whom he has given an elastic check; and that he finds the job distasteful because, being in love with her, he dislikes . the role of fortune hunter. When Paul (Gregory Ratoff), a waiter at the Cafe Metropole, turns out to be a genuine Prince Panaieff, the situation becomes so involved that even Proprietor Victor has an anxious moment or two before the denouement in which Victor gets the money he needs to save his cafe, Laura Ridgeway gets her impostor.

A fragile anecdote, Cafe Metropole turns out to be thoroughly entertaining. Russian Actor Ratoff, who wrote the story from which Author Jacques Deval (Tovarich) adapted the screen play, acts his fat part with the enthusiasm it deserves, sets the pace for the rest of a cast of which each member is performing a specialty in which he is tops. Good shot: Adolphe Menjou, Hollywood’s ablest exponent of the art of playing maitre d’ hotel since The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (1926), introducing a dish of wild strawberries, brought from Algeria by special plane.