Cinema: The New Pictures: May 30, 1932

Reserved for Ladies (Paramount British) is a witty statement of the social status of a prince of London headwaiters (Leslie Howard) who falls in love incognito with a South African heiress (Elizabeth Allan). He follows her from shop to shop, picking up things she drops; to her hotel (whose dining-room autocrat he is); to the Austrian Tyrol. He is making progress against her sniggers when an incognito King (George Grossmith) comes to the inn, is ah’d and curtseyed at, recognizes Headwaiter Howard as an old friend. Howard explains his own incognito which the King respects, inviting him to dinner, establishing him as at least a prince. The girl, as girl to prince, now pooh-poohs social distinctions. Howard agrees but, as headwaiter to girl, he dares not undeceive her. They part. The benevolent King brings them together again in Leslie Howard’s hotel dining-room where, as heiress to headwaiter, she snubs him unhappily until the headwaiter vanishes and discloses—lo! a man. The social inflections of the story are British but the ending is satisfactorily U. S.

Reserved for Ladies was first a story by Hungarian Dramatist Ernest Vajda, then a silent cinema, Service for Ladies with Adolphe Menjou in 1927. Amusing in both versions, its comedy is steadily improving with repetition. Hungarian Director Alexander Korda directed this talking version in England for Paramount, with U. S. money, English actors, cameramen, staff.* Leslie Howard does his usual discreet, effortless, alert job, delivering the bright lines of the dialog as though he habitually talked that way. George Grossmith as a tall, rheumatic, liverish, twinkling ramrod King, is a sly parody of Sweden’s Gustaf V.

Two Seconds (First National) is a turgid cinemelodrama of the moral bankrupting and liquidation of an honorable sucker (Edward G. Robinson). It opens with Robinson assuming the attitude in an electric chair and it is based on the unscientific theory that a man’s life unreels itself, complete with dialog, in the two seconds between the first twitch of the electricity and unconsciousness. Recapitulating, Robinson sees himself as a happy steelworker on a girder with his friend (Preston Foster). Soon, still happy, he is refusing to get involved with a pretty, scheming dancehall girl (Vivienne Osborne). She fills him full of liquor and marries him anyway and he is marked for the electric chair. In defending her against his best friend’s cynicisms, her husband boots the friend off his girder to death. Robinson’s nerves are so shattered by this that he stays home and jitters, allowing his wife to support him with her lover’s tainted money, which bothers Robinson to the point of gambling with it until he wins enough to pay back her lover. He then kills Vivienne Osborne, thereby getting out of the red morally, but broiling for it. Last shot: Robinson’s wide writhing mouth pleading up at the judge for two minutes, “You’re killing me at the wrong time. You should have killed me when I was taking his money. It ain’t fair to let a rat live and kill a man. It ain’t fair. It ain’t. . . .”

Huddle (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) contains precisely the amount of theatricals that a college cinema apparently needs in order to exist. But it contains no cinematic collegiates. It is lent unusual authenticity because all the scenes were taken on the Yale campus, because more than the expected number of actual football shots are shown, and because the hero, who is no gentleman, only ties the score in the final game with Harvard.

Tony (Ramon Novarro), an Italian puddler with an accent who goes to New Haven on a scholarship, is a boor whose one asset is knowing how to play fine football. Everyone heartily hates him—everyone except his roommate and Rosalie (Madge Evans), the daughter of the chairman of the steel company for which Tony used to work. Even she is shocked when he suggests they spend some time at a secluded inn. But when he plays through the Harvard game all the while threatened with appendicitis, and almost dies therefrom afterward, classmates & Rosalie know at last he is a true Eli.

Westward Passage (RKO) improves on Margaret Ayer Barnes’s novel but is still dull, incredible. It purports to show respectable ladies how to have their cake and eat it too. Ann Harding, more phlegmatic than usual, meets a penniless young Bohemian (Laurence Olivier) and elopes with him into poverty, diaper-drying and bickering, which bounce her into the arms of an appreciative tycoon (Irving Pichel). The new husband is substantial, adequate and unexciting for ten years or until the first husband turns up again, successful, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The combination results in a triumph for romance. An attempt has been made to put into the picture the confused moral values of Author Barnes’s novel, with the new twist confusing them even further. Typical sequence: Ann Harding and her first husband quarrel in a taxi. He gets out, goes to a speakeasy, repents, telephones her to join him. Ann Harding tramps gloomily in and says she is going to have a baby.

A Nous, La Liberté! (Tobis-Paris). French Director René Clair has made a brilliant attempt to do it all in one picture—comedy, romance, adventure, slapstick and satire on industry, prisons, society, the Machine Age and love. Amazingly, the film makes brilliant sense in every department, even to audiences ignorant of French. The picture opens with long rows of convicts tapping away at wooden toy horses. Two friends plan an escape. Louis (Raymond Cordy) succeeds, knocks over a bicyclist and rides victoriously into the finish of a bicycle race. He progressively masters burgher manners and the industrial system, becomes owner of a phonograph shop, then a department store, then a vast phonograph factory, in which mass production and prison methods are satirically interlined. The second convict, Emile (Henri Marchand), free at last, a wistful champion of the bill of rights, is jailed again for singing to flowers. Again he escapes, chases a pretty girl (Rolla France) into the phonograph factory, is herded into line, disrupts the phonograph-assembling routine with his fumbling individualism, finally confronts the phonograph tycoon, his old convict pal, disrupting also his routine. The plot now begins to spin like a pinwheel. Blackmailers, a love interest, the police, a fabulous Magic Park for lovers, a lost suitcase with the tycoon’s fortune, make a buoyant arrangement in nonsense, ending with a ceremony to celebrate the factory’s wiring for entire mechanization, no humans required. A high wind is blowing, silk hats teeter, the police are closing in on the convict-tycoon, the money in the lost suitcase begins to blow into the crowd, the grandstand collapses. … At last peace: the factory is mechanized, the ex-workers engaged in mass lounging, fishing, dancing. The two heroes go off singing for pennies on the highroad of liberty.

Director Clair keeps his characters, action and dialog as natural and human as possible. But the settings, the story, the mood of the direction, are stylized to achieve a dream quality. Director Clair uses anonymities for his leads; Actor Raymond Cordy was a taxi-driver a year ago. Admiration for Charlie Chaplin is shown in mob scenes, chases and stampedes which follow Chaplin’s principles of dance and pantomime. Director Clair, 30, was until 1926 a newspaperman whose novel, Adams, a story of Charlie Chaplin, had some success. He joined a Paris experimental art group specializing in cinema, produced The Italian Straw Hat, The Phantom of Moulin Rouge. International success began with talking pictures (Sous Les Toits de Paris, Le Million). For all his pictures René Clair writes the story and dialog, directs, cuts and edits. He has repeatedly rejected Hollywood contracts. Says he: “Hollywood wanted me for five years. If they are happy, they keep me; if I am unhappy, I must stay. It is not good for me. … It is more important to make good pictures than good money. . . . Money they can give you; liberty they cannot.” A Nous, La Liberté! was passed by the French censor after Liberty-Lover Clair had made some requested changes. Good shots: a crowd of silk hats in the factory yard running away from the camera; the parallel of the factory assembling table and the prison workshop.

*Paramount has studios in Paris (three years old) and at Elstree, England (one year old), both now selfsupporting. The Paris studio made pictures in 14 languages the first year, in French, German, Spanish and Swedish the second, only in French this year, dubbing in four other languages after pictures were completed. The English studio is 95% English-manned, with a U. S. supervising executive and sound machine supervisor.