Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 16, 1937

You Can’t Have Everything (Twentieth Century-Fox) was interesting to the Hays Office chiefly as the debut of Cinemactress Louise Hovick, who was Stripper Gypsy Rose Lee before Manhattan’s burlesque theatres were abruptly curtailed last spring. Disguised under several changes of expensive wraps, Miss Hovick stalks innocuously through You Can’t Have Everything without appreciably altering its merits as a smart and tuneful musical, cut from the same unpretentious pattern as its predecessors in Producer Darryl Zanuck’s recent musical cycle (Sing Baby Sing, Pigskin Parade, One in a Million, On the Avenue, Wake Up and Live).

The story, credited to Comedian Gregory Ratoff, concerns the ambition of fluffy Judith Poe Wells (Alice Faye) to write a searching play, one thing never achieved by her illustrious great grandfather Edgar Allan Poe.* When penniless Miss Wells consumes three orders of spaghetti in a Broadway restaurant, the proprietor and his violinist (Rubinoff) let her sing for her supper. That is enough to convince Diner George Macrae (Don Ameche), a successful musical comedy librettist, that Judith is wasting her time as a playwright. Although this impression is confirmed when Macrae and Producer Sam Gordon (Charles Winninger) read her dismal drama, North Winds, in which the principal characters all freeze to death, they take an option on it as a means of persuading Judith to sing in their forthcoming show. When both rehearsals and romance are upset by jealous Lulu Riley (Miss Hovick), Macrae gets everything running smoothly again by the miraculous expedient of converting North Winds into a hit musical.

Bound to disappoint the admirers of Gypsy Rose Lee, whose sultry gifts are confined to such lines as “I’ll cut your heart out and stuff it like an olive,” You Can’t Have Everything should satisfy almost everyone else. It gives the clowning Ritz Brothers the opportunity to extract the last zany twist from such sequences as playing a swing version of chopsticks, dressing as charwomen to break into the Y. W. C. A. To adept Song Pluggers Alice Faye and Tony Martin, Mack Gordon & Harry Revel have supplied a tiptop score of which the most singable numbers are the title song, Please Pardon Us, We’re in Love, and Danger, Love at Work.

Artists & Models (Paramount) begins with the Yacht Club Boys hysterically assembling a musical comedy production number for Chairman Mac Brewster (Jack Benny) of the Artists & Models Ball. That Chairman Brewster’s terse comment, “It stinks,” does not describe the haphazard entertainment that follows is mainly owing to the scenes which Jack Benny relieves with his deprecating brand of drollery. Otherwise Artists & Models, with Director Raoul Walsh struggling to wedge into it enough people and music for three shows, would have difficulty adding up to one.

Chairman Brewster wants to name a Queen of the Ball whom he can also use as a model for Townsend Silver advertising, thus assuring a million dollar account for his insolvent agency. When stuffy young Alan Townsend (Richard Arlen) tells him that he wants a socialite for both jobs, the indefatigable Brewster finds one in the person of Townsend’s fiancee Cynthia (Gail Patrick). But meantime Brewster’s professional model fiancée Paula Sewell (Ida Lupino) has pursued young Townsend to Miami, convinced him, apparently by drinking tea with an arched ringer, that she is an eligible socialite herself. Before this situation, complicated by the fact that Paula falls in love with Townsend and Cynthia is determined to marry Brewster, is worked out, Artists & Models presents:

¶ A skit with Artist Russell Patterson’s puppets, including the leering little gentleman from the covers of Esquire, vying with Comedian Ben Blue for the attentions of two skirted and rouged puppets.

¶ A scene in which Jack Benny out-gabs such topflight illustrators as McClelland Barclay, Peter Arno, Arthur William Brown and John LaGatta before getting back as good as he gives from wry Rube Goldberg.

¶ Martha Raye in blackface, outshouting dark Trumpeter Louis Armstrong in a loud and elaborate Harlem production number called Public Melody No. 1.

San Quentin (Warner Bros.) is an exciting and graphic investigation of the problems of prisoners and their keepers conducted with the authority which Warner Brothers have developed in the technique of sociological exposures. It is handicapped by a stenciled love story which has Jameson (Pat O’Brien), San Quentin’s tough yard captain, in love with May Kennedy (Ann Sheridan), the sister of the prison’s least pleasant inmate, Joe (Humphrey Bogart). However, the yard captain’s sentimental dilemma does not seriously retard the drama of the changes which concrete walls make in the lives of men who have to stay behind them whether for professional or punitive reasons. Druggin (Barton MacLane), a bear cat for discipline but incapable of handling men, is replaced by Jameson, an army officer who tries to substitute psychology for solitary confinement. His first test comes when a religious maniac gets hold of a guard’s rifle and threatens a mass massacre of his fellow convicts because they had refused spiritual redemption. With the amazing coolness common to motion picture actors in such crises, Jameson strolls up and takes the gun away from him. The next impasse is a sit-down strike staged at exercise time in the yard by convicts objecting to favoritism in the arrangement of prison jobs. That causes unfavorable publicity and Jameson’s policies are criticized by the prison board. He wins a tentative endorsement of his method of selecting men for work on the road gang but is faced with dismissal when Sailor (Joseph Sawyer) and Kennedy, with the help of Sailor’s moll and an old Lincoln touring car, jump the road gang, kidnapping Druggin. What follows is the year’s most exciting cops and convicts chase, involving the usual race with a freight train for road crossings, two sensational car crack-ups and one motorcycle spill. Kennedy gets away but goes back to vindicate Jameson’s faith in him when he discovers that the yard captain’s interest in May is of a lofty order. Best shot: striking convicts screaming in the locked cellblocks after the lights have been turned out.

* Edgar Allan Poe has no great granddaughters.