Cinema: Latest Labors

As the new movie season swung into high gear, Hollywood began peppering U. S. theatres thick & fast with a hybrid collection of pictures. Some of the fair, good and best were:

The Thief of Bagdad (United Artists), which Technicolors most of the natural phenomena in sight between London and Hollywood, including the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert. Against this setting, young Hindu Cinema Star Sabu, a brown-skinned blend of Mickey Rooney and Jon Hall, snatches food from Arab peddlers, scampers mischievously through vari-hued sultans’ palaces, grapples with monsters, summons a towering genie, flies over the top of the world, blows up the Grand Canyon and brings love to the lives of slim, handsome Ahmad (John Justin, now a pilot with the R. A. F.) and the buxom, slant-eyed Princess (June Duprez). The sinister forces are led by Conrad Veidt, who conjures up more dire magic and dirty treachery than the screen has seen since Dracula.

This conglomeration of fable, fantasy and monstrosity is British Producer Alexander Korda’s biggest bid for the spectacle trade long ago relinquished by D. W. Griffith. Two million dollars and two years’ tribulations were spent in his transposition of the Arabian Nights tales to the screen, during which the outbreak of war forced him to move production from his Denham studios near London to the United Artists lot in Hollywood at an added expense of $400,000.

Angels Over Broadway (Columbia). In spite of the fabulous salary he draws as a screen writer (some $6,000 weekly) balding Ben Hecht spends many of his expensive words on acid comments about Hollywood moviemakers. Possibly as protest, he and his sidekick, Playwright Charles MacArthur, took four flings at independent movie production, scored one bull’s-eye with The Scoundrel, eventually quit. This year, Columbia gave Hecht $260,000 worth of Hollywood backing with which he wrote, produced, directed Angels Over Broadway, another of his preoccupations with the regeneration of moral strays who have felt the cooling shadow of death. The three strays are a tippling, has-been playwright (Thomas Mitchell), a dapper drugstore cowboy (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), a lady of the evening (Rita Hayworth). In a Broadway honky-tonk they tie up with a small-time larcenist (John Qualen) about to commit suicide rather than face punishment for filching $3,000 to pamper his faithless wife. Before the evening is over they unite to win Qualen another $3,000, get themselves into some tense brushes with gamblers.

Because it shies clear of familiar Hollywood concepts of good & evil, is buoyed by lively literate dialogue and another of Mitchell’s poignant performances, and decorated with the shadowy photography of Lee Garmes, Angels Over Broadway rings with a specious tone of superiority. Cinemaudiences are likely to find later that, like a polished apple, its handsome exterior conceals the same old fruit.

A Dispatch from Reuter’s (Warner) traces the career of Julius Reuter, the founder of the now official British news agency, from curious boyhood through hard-pressed, aggressive maturity.

Edward G. Robinson, whose portrait of German Scientist Ehrlich entrenched him in the field of cinema biography, growls pleasantly through Reuter’s tribulations. He has to buck the artistic irresponsibility of his poet-partner Max (Eddie Albert) and the indifference of rubber-skinned bankers before he proves that pigeons can pack the news from Brussels to Aachen quicker than the fleetest stagecoach.

When the telegraph outmodes the pigeon, Reuter tightens his belt, sticks to his ideal of making the world smaller. He convinces even the archbacked London Times that it should subscribe to his—the first—news service.

It is hard to distinguish this 19th-Century film biography from many of its undistinguished predecessors.

They Knew What They Wanted (RKO Radio). When Tony Patucci (Charles Laughton), a porky, affable Italian winegrower in California’s Napa Valley, tries to patch up a quarrel between his ranch foreman (William Gargan) and his mail-order bride (Carole Lombard), he argues that “Peoples no should fight,” then speaks a little preachment on friendliness. During the filming of this scene one hot day last July, sprightly, spindly, 27-year-old Director Garson Kanin objected to Laughton’s delivery as too much Laughton, not enough Tony. A director-actor fight followed which had Hollywood gossips’ pens wagging for days, although the trouble was smoothed out the next day.

The principle behind the dispute was the same principle which has won Director Kanin, onetime handyman for Broadway Producer George Abbott, his letter in Hollywood after only three years. Earnest and honest in his work, he is a dissenter from the old director’s trick of stamping films with a personal emblem like the Lubitsch “touch.” The quick Kanin success has been based on the un-Hollywood device of taking the performers’ personalities out of a screen play, centering the emphasis on the development of the author’s characters.

Thus, They Knew What They Wanted, the cinema’s third version of the late Sidney Howard’s 1925 Pulitzer Prizewinning play, is principally a distinguished directorial exercise with three notable characterizations. A mustache, black curly hair, a soup-thick Italian accent hide the last vestiges of Captain Bligh in Laughton; Carole Lombard works the smell of tomato catsup into her hash-house waitress; William Gargan as the romantic ranch hand is a cad with gusto. Serious students of cinema technique will find many a valuable lesson watching these able craftsmen flex their artistic muscles as they act out the well-told tale of a pragmatic old Latin who would rather possess a pretty wife and baby even though both belonged to another. But the film’s talky treatment of the problems of inconstancy does much to prove that movies have to move to be Your Best Entertainment.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Arise, My Love (Claudette Colbert, Ray Milland, Walter Abel; TIME, Oct. 28).

Christmas in July (Dick Powell, Ellen Drew, Raymond Walburn, Ernest Truex; TIME, Oct. 21).

The Westerner (Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Doris Davenport; TIME, Oct. 14).

The Howards of Virginia (Gary Grant, Martha Scott, Sir Cedric Hardwicke; TIME, Sept. 16).