Cinema: The New Pictures: May 17, 1937

The Thirteenth Chair (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Like all stories which depend upon contrivance rather than on character, murder mysteries age fast. What is remarkable about The Thirteenth Chair is not that it is antiquated but that it should have withstood at all the fierce corrosion of two theatrical decades. Pathémade it as a silent in 1919, Metro as a talkie with Leila Hyams and Conrad Nagel in 1929.

In the present version Dame May Whitty is the psychic&#151a term which is itself a hallowed souvenir—who tries to solve a murder by making the twelve possible suspects hold hands in the dark. Things look bad for Nell O’Neill (Madge Evans) when John Wales (Henry Daniell) is stabbed at the seance, but clear up when, at the next psychic session, Dick Crosby (Thomas Beck) uses lampblack to prove that naughty Dr. Mason (Charles Trowbridge) was not holding hands. The Thirteenth Chair still saves a septuagenarian shiver for the moment when Madame La Grange reveals the murder knife stuck in the ceiling, but as dramaturgy it is more convincingly dead than any of Dr. Mason’s victims.

Make Way for Tomorrow (Paramount). The fact that a good story simply told is worth more than all the box-office names, production numbers and expensive sets in Hollywood is one of those plain truths which the cinema industry finds hardest to assimilate. Consequently, if Make Way for Tomorrow makes a fortune for its producers, Hollywood can be expected to exhibit amazement. No amazement is in order. Taking a subject about which everyone has speculated—the financial insecurity of old age—the picture examines the case of Barkley Cooper (Victor Moore) and his wife Lucy (Beulah Bondi). Adapted by Vina Delmar from Josephine Lawrence’s novel, directed by Leo McCarey (Ruggles of Red Gap), the story is presented with rare cinematic honesty. It is acted by Victor Moore, in his first serious cinema role, and seasoned Beulah Bondi, with that effortless perfection which, because it can come only from long experience, all younger actors lack. The result is one of the most persuasive documents about an old couple since the late Ring Lardner wrote Golden Honeymoon.

When Lucy and Barkley Cooper summon their grown children to announce that the bank has foreclosed the mortgage on their house, they are sure the children will provide a remedy. The children are less positive. George is trying to put a daughter through college. Cora’s husband is poor. Nellie’s husband’s business is bad. Robert has all he can do to look after himself. The plan they finally work out is for Lucy to live with George while Barkley goes to stay with Cora.

Broken by the first separation in their 50 years of marriage, Barkley and Lucy make bad visitors. Lucy interferes with her daughter-in-law’s bridge parties. Barkley gets in wrong with Cora. When the children decide, as an alternative arrangement, to send their father to a daughter who lives in California, their mother to an old ladies’ home, it solves the situation for everyone except Lucy and Barkley. They meet in New York, spend their last evening together on a mild spree and then, in a scene marked by its skilful reticence, say good-by at the train. Good shot: Lucy and Barkley accepting an invitation to try out anew car by a salesman who suspects that their modest clothes and quiet bearingare the insignia of wealth.

Killers of the Sea (Grand National). Hero of this five-reel sport feature is one Wallace Caswell, captain of the fishing schooner Princess and constable of Panama City, Fla. Caswell. according to Lowell Thomas, whose commentary is dubbed into the silent film shot on board the Princess, conceived as a boy so trenchant a disdain for sharks, turtles, sawfish and other sea killers that upon reaching manhood he dedicated himself to slaughtering them singlehanded, using no other weapon than a fish knife.

Killers of the Sea shows Caswell wrestling and subduing a 12-ft. bottle-nosed killer whale, a gigantic snapping sea turtle, an octopus, a sawfish and a tiger shark. There are many repetitions of the dramatic moment when, spying some deep-sea enemy, Caswell, “The Man of Steel, G-Man of the Deep,” rips off his breeches and dives to the attack, knife in teeth. Audiences will guess that some energetic harpooning of the monsters has preceded Caswell’s scrimmages: the fish stay on the surface to be photographed in a manner fish seldom consent to unless submergence is impossible due to the fact that they are nine-tenths dead and full of air.

Highlight of the captain’s combats is the one with the tigershark, photographed with a man-eater which appears to be dead. But the spirit of engaging fakery animating Killers of the Sea has a happier embodiment in the octopus sequence. This time ”the man of steel” rescues his buddy, a diver, bogged down by a devilfish, his airline severed by a turtle’s bite. Caswell swims down several fathoms and dispatches the devilfish, slitting its ink sac with one blow of his trusty fish knife. Lowell Thomas explains that the captain’s baldness is the result of a skull slash by a deep-sea monster, but makes no effort to analyze why the captain swims so awkwardly or why “a man of steel” should keep himself so plump. Killers of the Sea contains some really good shots of a white man and a Negro in a dory being towed and finally upset by a huge blackfish which they have harpooned.

Call It a Day (Warner) is an amiable adaptation of Dodie Smith’s gentle little comedy about one spring day in the life of the Hilton family. In the class of dramaturgy which depends upon making much of trifles, Call It a Day is about the last possible refinement. Not only does nothing actually happen in the story but the fact that at its end the Hiltons are exactly where they were at its beginning constitutes its denouement. This is because, in the interim, each has been touched, lightly as by the warm March wind, by currents in life that invite or threaten change. Seventeen-year-old Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) has fallen in first love with the artist who is painting her portrait. Her brother Martin (Peter Willes) is interrupted in planning to run away from home by an invitation to dinner from the girl next door (Anita Louise). Roger Hilton (Ian Hunter), a diligent and prosperous accountant, has had a first-rate chance for extramarital adventure with an actress. Dorothy, his wife (Frieda Inescort), has received an equally alarming proposal from her best friend’s brother, Frank Haines (Roland Young).

A clever tribute to that most rarely dramatized of virtues, the civilized inhibition, Call It a Day is gracefully acted and directed. Especially successful in creating the character of an attractive woman who is first and foremost an attractive lady is Frieda Inescort, most of whose previous roles in cinema have done her talents less than justice. Good shot: Mrs. Hilton and Frank Haines sitting down alone to the dinner at which she promised him the com-pany of her happy and devoted family.