Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 7, 1938

The Adventures of Marco Polo (Samuel Goldwyn). This grotesquely cast Marco Polo skips like a cockleshell over the surface of Marco’s famed Munchausenish travel tale, comes at length to a cockleshell’s finale. With about as much relish for his task as a small boy’s for his homework, lank, ingenuous Actor Gary Cooper dons Marco’s 13th-Century raiment, crosses desert, sea & mountain only to find, in a remarkable conception of old Peking, George Barbier dressed up as Kublai Khan. Historically, Kublai Khan was China’s strong man, who conquered all of China & ruled more subjects than he could count. ProducerGoldwyn’s Cathay is pretty thoroughly under the well-manicured thumb of Basil Rathbone, a saturnine, bewhiskered minister of state. And Producer Goldwyn’s Marco Polo finds career enough for any Venetian in naïve, unkissed Princess Kukachin, with her wide-set eyes, parted, quivering lips, two-story hairdo.

Behind her rigging and wigging, Princess Kukachin is blonde, wide-mouthed Norwegian Sigrid Gurie, engaged by Producer Goldwyn with elaborate secrecy. Cinemaudiences may recognize her as the girl Gary Cooper taught to kiss in one four-minute cinema lesson, a sequence to go down in cinema history with the Garbo-Gilbert pacesetter (Flesh and the Devil) and the May Irwin-John C. Rice long count of 1896.

The most talked-up cinema in many a year, Marco Palo proves the contention popularly attributed to the oft-twisted Goldwyn tongue: that verbal promises are seldom worth the paper they are written on. Retired Cinemactor Douglas Fairbanks toyed with the idea three years ago, then passed it along to Producer Goldwyn. First loud stunt of the Goldwyn staff was to trumpet an invitation to young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, kidnapper of Chiang Kaishek, to lead Kublai Khan’s cohorts. When Producer Goldwyn, who had discovered Actor Cooper over a decade before (The Winning of Barbara Worth), lured him back from Paramount to play Marco, Paramount helpfully hollered bloody murder, sued unsuccessfully for $5,000,000. When the astronomical Paramount suit sputtered out, the Goldwyn staff tried one more impertinent plug. They wired Egypt’s Washington minister for “rates and conditions” for posting their bills on the Pyramids.

Mad About Music (Universal). Greatest asset of deficit-ridden Universal Pictures Co. Inc. is wholesome, rich-voiced, 16-year-old Deanna Durbin. When her first featured picture, Three Smart Girls, was started in 1936, Universal, newly taken over from Carl Laemmle Sr. by a syndicate headed by Banker John Cheever Cowdin, was $1,835,419.07 in the red as of Oct. 30. Three Smart Girls cost about $300,000, has thus far grossed almost $2,000,000. Six months ago Deanna’s second film, 100 Men and a Girl, was released and immediately justified the added expenditure allowed for it. Last week Universal reported itself $750,000 nearer the black. Its deficit as of Oct. 30, 1937 was approximately the cost of Deanna’s third film, Mad About Music.

Worth every cent it cost, Mad About Music is Deanna’s (and the new Universal’s) best picture to date. In the charming setting of a small Swiss village, Deanna lives out a gay-and-pathetic story. Herfather is dead, her mother a Hollywood glamor girl (Gail Patrick) who can’t afford to admit she has a 14-year-old daughter. Deanna keeps her mother’s secret, but to match tales with her schoolmates, conjures up a debonair, daring, doting father. When, as it does to allfabricators, the day comes when she must substantiate her stories, mellow, understanding Actor Herbert Marshall steps off the train, finds himself doing and saying things he never dreamed of.

What makes Mad About Music such heart-warming entertainment is that, in addition to a good cast and first-rate acting, it has a story into which Deanna’s singing fits naturally and well. Director Norman Taurog, famed for his handling of child players (Skippy, Sooky, Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Tom Sawyer). makes the tale tick along like a fine watch, keeps his schoolgirls under better control than any schoolmarm could. Advancing the plot with every liquid note, Deanna sings Gounod’s Ave Maria and three compositions by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson. Best of them: I Love To Whistle.

Good bit: Valet Arthur Treacher before a mirror, rehearsing a dressing down for Master Marshall, and getting caught at it.

Bringing Up Baby (RKO-Radio). When she was a college girl ten years ago, redheaded, Melpomene-mouthed Katharine Hepburn, in a trailing white nightgown crosshatched with gold ribbon, regaled Bryn Mawr as Pandora in The Woman in the Moon. And since then most of Actress Hepburn’s public appearances have been for the catch-in-the-throat cinema, playing alternately great ladies and emotional starvelings of brittle bravado. For Bringing Up Baby she plumps her broad A in the midst of a frantically farcical plot involving Actor Gary Grant, a terrier, a leopard, a Brontosaurus skeleton and a crotchety collection of Connecticut quidnuncs, proves she can be as amusingly skittery a comedienne as the best of them.

Actor Grant is an earnest, bespectacled paleontologist who is more interested in an intercostal clavicle for his nearly reconstructed Brontosaurus than he is in bony, scatterbrained Miss Hepburn. MissHepburn has a pet leopard named Baby, and an aunt (May Robson) with $1,000,000 waiting for the right museum. On the trail of the million, Actor Grant crosses paths with Actress Hepburn and Baby, loses the scent in the tangled Connecticut wildwood. In the jail of a town very like arty Westport, the trails collide. Most surprising scene: Actress Hepburn, dropping her broad A for a nasal Broadway accent, knocking Town Constable Walter Catlett and Jailmate Grant completely off balance with: “Hey, flatfoot! I’m gonna unbutton my puss and shoot the woiks. An’ I wouldn’ be squealin’ if he hadn’ a give me the runaround for another twist.”

Under the deft, directorial hand of Howard Hawks, Bringing Up Baby comes off second only to last year’s whimsical high spot, The Awful Truth, but its gaily inconsequent situations cannot match the fuselike fatality of that extraordinary picture. Bringing Up Baby’s slapstick is irrational, rough-&-tumble, undignified, obviously devised with the idea that the cinemaudience will enjoy (as it does) seeing stagy Actress Hepburn get a proper mussing up.