Cinema: The New Pictures: Nov. 15, 1937

Hurricane (Samuel Goldwyn). Since most Hollywood actors and many actresses look foolish when stripped down to a sarong, pictures requiring this type of undress are proverbially hard to cast. Producer Samuel (“The Touch”) Goldwyn risked almost two million dollars on the talents of an unknown young actor and; a girl who a year ago was a $75-a-week stock player.

Jon Hall (real name Charles Locher), 24, was known as “Terutevaegiai” (young white god on Heaven’s highest shelf) by the Tahitians with whom he paddled outrigger canoes, rode surf boards, and whom he defeated in the all-island swimming championship of 1926. His father, Felix Locher, onetime resident of Tahiti, is now a Los Angeles insurance broker. Hall is a second cousin by marriage to Hurricane’s coauthor, James Norman Hall. His well-distributed 190-lb. frame enabled him to win fame as a track star and ski-jumper when he left Tahiti to go to school at Neuchatel, Switzerland. He had been acting in a few plays in the down-at-heel Hollywood Playhouse when Director John Ford, a neighbor, noticing his build and good-looks, suggested he be tested for the role of Terangi. Picked out of 160 candidates for the lead in his cousin’s story, Hall found his brawn useful when battered daily in the Goldwyn tank by repetitious deluges of 2,000 gallons of water, thrown at him from a height of 65 feet, for his aquatic skill when he dived from the 70-ft. mainmast of a schooner, from a 75-ft. cliff, freestyled through the water while sharpshooters pumped bullets around him.

Dorothy Lamour (Jungle Princess, High, Wide and Handsome), lithe but unathletic, was publicized by Paramount, which loaned her to Goldwyn for Hurricane, as a jungle-woman who lived on bananas, coconuts, papayas. A monkey and a leopard were planted in her apartment, over her protests, until the monkey got loose, so disturbed other tenants that police were called. Miss Lamour (nee Slaton), 22, has never been nearer a jungle than the isthmus at Catalina Island, where parts of Hurricane were filmed. She is a 5 ft. 5 in., 117-lb., healthy, heavy-lipped New Orleans girl who won a beauty contest, went to Chicago, sang with Herbie Kay’s orchestra on a “celebrity night” program, married Kay.

The palpable success of Mr. Goldwyn’s gamble on his two “discoveries” is due partly to their own able performances, partly to the skillful production of bald, burly Associate Producer Merritt Hulburd, partly to the inherent soundness of the story by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Their hero, Terangi (Jon Hall), has been happy all his life because he has been free and healthy. His boss, Captain Nagle (Jerome Cowan), gave him a blue cap when he made him first mate of the fishing schooner; after that Terangi was happier than ever. His happiness reached a vivid, lyric pinnacle when he was married in the Catholic church, in front of all the island, to his love, Marama (Dorothy Lamour). He did not understand her nightmare a few nights later when she dreamt of a high wind and birds flying away. Its omen seemed to have no bearing on the six-months’ jail sentence he drew on his next trip for hitting a white bully in a waterfront saloon.

Like his fellow-islanders, Terangi could not stand confinement, and he wanted to get back to Marama. He broke jail so many times that he became a legend. Each time he tried to get away he added from two to five years to his sentence. Eight years had passed before he hit on the scheme of pretending to hang himself so that the jailer would come in and bring the keys. He killed a sentry with a blow of his fist, paddled an outrigger 600 miles back to his own atoll. He had just found Marama again when a hurricane hit the island.

Up to this point, Hurricane has an unforgettable feeling of dark forces closing in around a wild free man. When they turn the wind loose, however, Authors Nordhoff & Hall, Screenwriters Dudley Nichols & Oliver H. P. Garrett wash out their own story. They also wash all the trees, houses, boats, animals and people off the atoll, leaving nothing but the Robert Edmond Jonesish ruin of a church. The hurricane lasts for 20 minutes. It is a technically superb, terrifying combination of miniatures, real storm shots, tank shots, stage shots made with wind machines, all blended with bursts of inhuman music as savage as the piping of damnation. During the course of it Terangi proves his worth by getting a rope to the church, rescuing Madame de Laage (Mary Astor), whose husband, Resident Governor Eugene de Laage (Raymond Massey). stood ready to send him back to prison. When the waves subside, one group of survivors, lashed to a tree, is bobbing on the waves. Another has weathered the blow in a beached lifeboat in which, while the hurricane raged, a child was somehow born. Madame de Laage shows what good breeding can accomplish by surviving the worst storm in cinema history without spoiling her light dress or losing the wave in her hair. She ends in the arms of her husband who, grateful, decides not to persecute Terangi further.

Special effect Specialist James Basevi (San Francisco) learned from hurricane survivors that hurricane sounds vary according to the shape and solidity of objects in the path of the wind. Scale models of buildings and trees were placed in a governed wind stream, and the differing effects recorded. Then Goldwyn engineers stepped up the recording pitch by the same ratio that existed between the scale models and the actual set, got the authentic sound of wind velocities as high as 250 m.p.h.

Associate Producer Hulburd bought Hurricane for $60,000. In due time a friendly letter came from Authors Nordhoff & Hall. They were mightily pleased to know that he had bought their story, they said, because Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had made such an admirable job of Mutiny on the Bounty. Samuel Goldwyn has never been connected with MGM.

Danger—Love at Work (Twentieth Century-Fox). Junior Pemberton (Bennie Bartlett) had at ten the condescension of a fellow who was ready to enter Harvard. Uncle Alan (Walter Catlett) collected stamps. Brother Herbert (John Carradine) called himself a postsurrealist; he painted sublimations in bathrooms, on bay windows, hired a man to douse him with water when working on a marine subject. Mother Pemberton (Mary Boland) was notable for an insane kind of poise which she maintained even when the cook got drunk and had to be locked in the mop closet, or the downstairs maid tried to touch the family for three dollars to pay her bookmaker. Papa Pemberton (Etienne Girardot) might have received the Nobel Prize for breaking down the atom if Junior had not objected that the award would overshadow his fame as a child prodigy.

Only one of the Pembertons, Toni (Ann Sothern), was half sane. She helped poor Henry MacMorrow (Jack . Haley), the lawyer who was trying to get her family’s signatures to documents enabling him to sell a piece of land they owned. Uncle Goliath (Maurice Cass) was the hardest one to persuade. To prove that civilization was a failure, he was living, dressed in bearskins, in a cave adjacent to his 40-room house. By the time Goliath signed the power of attorney on a piece of hide, Toni and Henry were in love. Toni knew that her family would never speak to her again unless she was married in church — so she and Henry went to a justice of the peace.

Amiably following the established for mula for stories about crazy families, Danger — Love at Work is unpretentious, well-paced and often very funny. Typical scene: Papa Pemberton trying to pick out the proper type of shotgun for use at a fashionable wedding.

Dr. Syn (Gaumont-British). To millions for whom the cinema is history’s picture book, great figures like Alexander Hamilton, Disraeli, Voltaire, Rothschild. Richelieu et al. share one marked characteristic—an extraordinary resemblance to Actor George Arliss. Once even God looked something like him (The Man Who PlayedGod). But whatever else he is supposed to represent, Actor Arliss is always his own suave self. He was never more so than in Dr. Syn. In the dual roles of an 18th century pirate and the kindly vicar of Dymchurch-under-the-wall, 69-year-old Actor Arliss takes a well-deserved vacation from high matters, enjoys a revel in unmonocled duplicity. To the simple folk of Dymchurchhe is an example in godliness; to his pirate crew, an iron leader; to His Majesty’s revenuers, a headache— all of which added together make a picture to appeal to those who in an earlier era adored Robert Louis Stevenson.

Precise, neat Actor Arliss was Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s leading man in 1901, has since assumed well-bred heroic proportions in the cinema. His next role may be a screen portrait of the late John D. Rockefeller. His well-wishers, meanwhile, are urging a fitting cinememorial, The Life of George Arliss, with Mr. Paul Muni.

Madame Bovary (Terra). Last spring Paris-Soir aired the rumor that Adolf Hitler’s middleaged, platonic fancy had turned from red-haired 29-year-old cinemactress Leni Riefenstahl (who in three years as his favorite had risen to ranking Nazi film authority) to 38-year-old Pola Negri (born Appollonia Chalupec), whose round poll and lank black hair once marked her as the No. 1 vamp of the screen. Bogeyman Paul Joseph Goebbels was reported frightening Fraulein Riefenstahl by denouncing her for non-Aryan ancestry (TIME, June 21). The Fuhrer, having searched Pola’s title to Aryanism, took special pains to affirm it. He had already pronounced: “It is I who decide who is a Jew and who is not.”

Last week U. S. cinemaudiences saw a charmingly enameled Pola, matronly to the points of her double chin, die the remorseful death of fickle Madame Bovary. She was no longer the dashing, fiery Pola of Passion and Gypsy Blood. The 1937 Madame Bovary loves nice things, has a roving eye, a fat medico husband. Her eye gets to roving before her husband has had time to get down to the business of properly neglecting her, and the story, though warranted Aryan, is far from Flaubert.