Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 16, 1931

Ten Cents a Dance (Columbia). Back of Hollywood’s system of finding type-actors for certain parts and securing the same actors whenever these parts turn up is the theory that bit-part actors, like the stars, have their personal following. But this system has weaknesses, and Ten Cents a Dance suffers from the fact that Monroe Owsley happens now to be Cinema’s outstanding cad. His chin is in favor for its weakness, his eye for its shiftiness. The common knowledge that Monroe Owsley is a cad gives away the plot. Last week he was a cad in Honor Among Lovers and, sure enough, Ten Cents a Dance has an identical story about two men in love with a girl, the rich young man decent and the poor young man (Owsley) dishonest and weak. The only difference between Honor Among Lovers and Ten Cents a Dance is that the latter is set against a dancehall background instead of the beau monde and that handsome Barbara Stanwyck is in it. Spectators know as soon as they see Owsley that Ricardo Cortez is going to get Miss Stanwyck in the end. But such spectators will not go home: Barbara Stanwyck will hold them. She makes the dialog — so jerky and stilted on the lips of the rest of the cast — sound as though it were superbly written. In the picture she has the same troubles as the girl in Rodgers & Hart’s famed song, from which the title is taken:

Ten cents a dance, that’s what they pay me,

Gosh how they weigh me down!

Ten cents a dance, pansies and rough guys,

Tough guys who tear my gown. . . .

For the sound device, less rhythmically, she exclaims: “I wish I could tie up that trumpeter and make a saxophone player play in his ears until he dies.” Most expected shot: Owsley accusing Miss Stanwyck of infidelity after she has left the dance hall because he was jealous of the many men who danced with her.

Barbara Stanwyck is a 23-year-old Brooklyn girl who tried stenography and a telephone switchboard before she landed a chorus job on the Strand Roof. In a show called Keep Kool she did an imitation of the late Louis Wolheim in The Hairy Ape. She moved through the Follies and a few other musical shows before her first straight role in The Noose. In Burlesque she made theatrical history. Another of her current pictures, Illicit, is one of the year’s best.

Kiki (United Artists). With decades in ringlets behind her, Mary Pickford has become a madcap. If she finds madcapping tiring at her age no one can tell from the results except that at times she seems to work a bit too hard at it. In The Taming of the Shrew, she was a madcap in costume, which was an advantage. In Coquette she had an hysterical scene which was widely applauded and made up for her routine madcapping. In Kiki the madcapping consists of losing her panties on the stage, reading other people’s letters, using a hatpin as a dagger, wrestling with a butler, falling into a bass drum, and remaining, through it all, a Nice Girl. The story, which has been filmed before with Norma Talmadge and Ronald Colman, deals with a show girl in love with the manager of her show. The humor is mechanical and not really funny, but once more Mary Pickford’s industry and a tested stage vehicle win out: Kiki is fair entertainment. Best shot: Kiki going into a cataleptic trance to keep the manager from throwing her out of his apartment.

Dishonored (Paramount). Even in documentary reports of their activities, spies are hard to believe in. Mata Hari, the Dutch woman who worked for Germany in the bedrooms of the Allied military staffs in 1915 and thereafter, has been made increasingly phantasmal by the legends which have grown up around her since her death before the rifles of a firing squad. This picture is an additional footnote to the Mata Hari theme. It is really just another spy story but it is distinguished by two important features: the acting of Marlene Dietrich and the direction of Josef von Sternberg.

Miss Dietrich does well at spying until she falls in love with Victor McLaglen, who is spying for the other side. When he is arrested she contrives his escape. She is executed after an Austrian court-martial. In various disguises she is a streetwalker, a peasant, a seductive adventuress, and a woman who, on trial for her life, has put off all disguises. She makes these roles exciting by her composure, her beautiful legs, her level voice, and her ability to suggest, with a lowered eyelid and a cynical tilt of her mouth, that she perceives aspects in life which are concealed from ordinary people. She is helped immensely by von Sternberg. Into the melodramatic episodes of the plot he has brought an atmosphere as intense as that which a fine prose writer creates in the scenes which interest him most. Sometimes his love of detail results in something silly. But there are other scenes when detail is effective: the moment when the first officer Miss Dietrich has betrayed surrenders to her and, eating a bunch of grapes, goes into the next room and shoots himself; the people at the table in a gambling house; the suggestions of fate in the mechanical actions, the heavy, leaden clarity of the figures assembled in the courtyard for the execution. Like all spy stories, Dishonored is at times rather confused, but it is interesting. Best idea: the spy sends her reports in a code consisting of musical notes, and the crash of the music suggested by these notes, spraying from a pianoforte, is conjured into pictures showing the music’s meaning: War.

Josef von Sternberg was born in Vienna, grammar-schooled in New York, graduated by the University of Vienna. He denies that his real name is Joe Stern and that he is a pants-presser who acquired a new name and a foreign accent in one trip abroad. On the lot he issues commands in Manhattan slang and a guttural accent. He once wrote a novel in English, Daughters of Vienna, published in Austria. He got into the picture business with William A. Brady when Brady was director-general of Vitagraph but it was not until ten years later that he directed his first feature, The Salvation Hunters. It cost $5,000, earned a fortune, made von Sternberg famous. His next picture, The Sea Gull, was such a failure that for a while no company would trust him. In 1927 he made Underworld, which started the vogue of crook pictures. He puts a black cat in every picture he makes although he is no longer superstitious about black cats. The black cat has become his signature, like Whistler’s butterfly. Some of his other pictures: The Last Command, The Blue Angel, Morocco.

Don’t Bet on Women (Fox). This picture takes a comedy situation, about good enough for a five-line gag in a vaudeville act, and strings it out somehow into a really funny feature. The three people in the gag are a man-about-town, his lawyer and his lawyer’s wife. Every woman, says the man-about-town, wants to be kissed. The lawyer says his wife is an exception. To prove his point the man-about-town bets $10,000 he can kiss the next woman who comes out on the veranda. Edmund Lowe, Jeanette MacDonold and Roland Young are the principals. Best part: Una Merkel as an insufferable Girl from the South.

Unfaithful (Paramount). Ruth Chatterton, who has made a reputation as an actress of heavy dramatic parts, has up to this time kept in control her instinct for staginess and lah-de-dah affectation. In Unfaithful, she takes the lid off. She is the U. S. wife of a frivolous British nobleman. She knows her husband is unfaithful but she cannot divorce him because to do that would let her high-strung brother know that his wife is the peer’s mistress. There are possibilities in the idea, in spite of clumsy direction, but whatever possibilities there are Miss Chatterton lah-de-dahs out of existence. Typical moment of embarrassment, introduced as comic relief: Lady Kilkerry shooting craps with two U. S. sailors.