Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 1, 1938

Mother Carey’s Chickens (RKO Radio) is Kate Douglas Wiggin’s folksy storyof the ups & downs of a horse-&-buggy family. Filmed with a heartinessand warmth calculated to reawaken memories of toasty nights around the parlor baseburner, Mother Carey’s Chickens joins Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s homely Judge Hardy and Twentieth Century-Fox’s happy-go-lucky Jones Family in cinema’s new grand march to the tune of Home, Sweet Home.

Pausing in their eager, pathetic quest for a happy, permanent roost, Mother Carey’s cinema chicks scratch up a few adventures that were not of Mrs. Wiggin’s planting, but whatever they unearth is homey stuff. Little Peter (Donnie Dunagan) prattles through an experiment in paperhanging with a three-year-old’s matchless deviltry; adolescent Gilbert (Jackie Moranj finds his voice cracking just when he needsdignity most; Lally Joy (Virginia Weidler), thrifty Storekeeper Popham’s girl, wears her button shoes on the wrong feet every other day to keep the heels from running over too much to the side; beau-aged Nancy and Kitty (Anne Shirley, Ruby Keeler) get in & out of sweetheart tangles without a scratch. Mothering this engaging brood is mature Actress Fay Bainter, probably the nearest cinema has to the Mother Carey Mrs. Wiggin had in mind. RKO had originally planned Mother Carey’s Chickens for Actress Katharine Hepburn. Fortunately, Actress Hepburn refused the part. Result: Instead of pointing at the star, the camera manages to keep all the cast in focus.

Little Miss Broadway (Twentieth Century-Fox) pits Shirley Temple’s curls and dimples against the lengthy, dour countenance of Edna May Oliver. To win over a fitful Manhattan millionairess is child’s play for Shirley, who has spent her precocious career winning over a variety of toughs, misanthropes, hard-hearted colonels and capricious sea captains.

In Little Miss Broadway, Shirley is a high-spirited orphan always on the point of breaking into a tap routine or a Walter Bullock-Harold Spina song. She is adopted by a lackadaisical Broadway character (Edward Ellis), who runs a seedy hotel for vaudeville actors. After a while, the exuberance of Jimmy Durante and his five-man orchestra get on the nerves of the lady next door (Edna May Oliver). She owns the hotel, but when she tries to evict the vaudevillians she runs up against Shirley. Shirley captivates the old lady by singing Swing Me an Old Fashioned Song.

The Terror of Tiny Town (Jed Buell). “If this economy drive keeps on, we’ll end up using midgets for actors.” To hefty, thrifty Movie Producer Jed Buell this crack of a subordinate was intended as a reproof. Instead it gave him an idea. Soon he was collecting all the midgets he could reach through agencies, advertisements, radio broadcasts (“big salaries for little people”). They drifted in by twos and threes. From Hawaii came a troupe of 14. At length he had 60 of them, averaging three-feet-eight in height, about 70 Ibs., ranging in age from 19 to 65. Meanwhile, his writers turned out a script for a “rollickin’, rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ drama of the Great Outdoors.”

On the Lazy A ranch at Santa Susana, Calif., Producer Buell started filming the first all-midget photoplay ever made. He had troubles. The flaccid little people tumbled off ponies, had trouble handling man-sized six guns, had attacks of temperament and sunburn. Finally, at a cost of almost $100,000 and many a headache, the film was finished.

Last fortnight, at the second-run Ritz Theatre in Los Angeles, audiences chuckled good-naturedly at Producer Buell’s novelty horse opera, but only once did they really howl : when three-foot-nine Hero Billy Curtis, pursuing three-foot-nine villain Little Billy, galloped off on a black pony, was soon scooting along on a white pony, finished the chase on the black. Trouble with The Terror of Tiny Town, Producer Buell was soon to realize, was that without a few normal-sized folks for contrast, midgets appear much like other people. Next time out, Producer Buell’s half-pint stock company will have something to stack up against. They will act out the legend of the mighty lumber man, Paul Bunyan, with a burly upper case actor in the lead.