The New Pictures, Sep. 15, 1941

Unfinished Business (Universal) is a title with a meaning, i.e., every woman has some unfinished business in her life. In the life of Nancy Adams (Irene Dunne) it is a premarital romance with her husband’s elder brother (Preston Foster). Until she makes her husband (Robert Montgomery) accept its significance, their marriage is a bust.

In the hands of a lesser director than Gregory La Cava (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door) this theme might well have turned sour. By superb cinema artistry he raises it to the level of subtle, entertaining comedy without losing sight of its basic problem. That tour de force is a rare cinema triumph.

Much of the charm of Unfinished Business is its lack of what passes for acting in Hollywood. For the most part, its characters are just people—people that any cinemagoer would be likely to meet and know. So human and natural are the principals that they are scarcely recognizable from their former cinema roles.

Unfinished Business is a mosaic of wisely done camera sequences. Irene Dunne, a small-town Midwestern voice teacher, has come to Manhattan for adventure and a career. Saddened by her unrequited love for Foster, a wealthy wolf, she flunks her operatic try out. As she departs, she is told that her voice is good, that there must be a place for it somewhere. In a flick of the camera lens she is singing happy-birthday messages into a telephone from a telegraph office.

Once established, this comic mood splits the plot wide open. Billy Ross (Walter Catlett), nightclub impresario, gets a birthday greeting from Miss Dunne, orders her to report for rehearsals. Another switch, and in a wonderfully nonsensical scene he hires her to be his lyrical phone girl.

What sets Unfinished Business in a class by itself is the fact that it is truly a moving picture—not just photographed talk, or a photographed play, or a travelogue with actors. It is a product devised for the special talents of the movie camera.

The ability to make extremely good motion pictures has long belonged to George Gregory La Cava, a grizzled, balding, vigorous little man with an irrepressible fund of humor, a fierce integrity, and an unholy belligerence that has kept him in hot water most of his life. He made his first feature picture (Restless Wives, with Doris Kenyon and Edna May Oliver) 17 years ago at the Astoria Studios on Long Island.

But the right to make his kind of pictures without studio interference was a long time coming for La Cava. Famed was his feud with the late Irving Thalberg. Accustomed to being consulted before each day’s shooting, Thalberg was furious when his new director ignored his calls to counsel. When the irate producer arrived on the set, the director, warned of his coming, was placidly practicing golf shots while his actors rehearsed themselves. The conversation was brief:

Thalberg: “Why haven’t you been up to see me?”

La Cava: “Why should I?”

Thalberg: “I don’t like the way this scene is being handled.”

La Cava: “O.K., you direct it.”

No Hollywood director is so free from executive meddling today as La Cava. The public likes his pictures (he claims never to have made a box-office flop), studios like his economy, actors like to work for him, and executives are afraid to brave his withering tongue. As a result La Cava generally gets a fat fee ($100,000-$150,000) for turning out a picture.

Unorthodox is La Cava’s method of making a picture. He believes that the screen is not (like the stage) an acting medium, that a scene plays itself. La Cava begins a picture by throwing away the script, keeping the bare outline of the plot and developing it spontaneously around the personalities of the actors he has selected. If a scene rings true, it is right; if not, the actor should not be forced to play it. He writes most of the new script himself.

Closest crony and bitterest critic of Director La Cava, now 49, is another unreconstructed Hollywoodian, one W. C. Fields. Fields refers to La Cava as The Wop. La Cava’s nickname for the comedian is unprintable. Crack golfers, they used to play for $100 a hole. Fields, who says he would cheat his own grandmother for cash, generally managed to talk his opponent out of match and stakes. He has willed him (although La Cava doesn’t know it) $5,000 for mad money.

Parachute Battalion (RKO Radio) is exciting proof that World War II is eminently photogenic. Although the picture’s foremost actors, the U.S. Army’s 501st Parachute Battalion, are now at peace, their heavenly ballet is a hair-raising dress rehearsal of war’s newest arm.

Shot partly on the 501st’s home grounds at Fort Benning, Ga., Parachute Battalion follows the rigorous training of a modern parachutist with documentary nicety. And its shiploads of husky, fully equipped youngsters cascading out of their transports like peas from a pod make first-rate drama.

Best that can be said for Parachute’s hackneyed story of how the Army made parachutists out of a feuding hillbilly (Buddy Ebsen), a colonel’s son who thought himself yellow (Edmond O’Brien) and an amorous football hero (Robert Preston) is that the picture survives the plot’s monkeyshines. Better left unmentioned is RKO’s error in making its football chutist an All-American from Harvard, a university which has not turned out a bona fide All-American in nine years.