Cinema: The New Pictures Oct. 27, 1930

Heads Up (Paramount). Heads Up has much glitter and is well put together; the main reason for its dullness is that the central role is serious. This role is played with his usual professional boyishness by goo-goo-eyed Charles (“Buddy”) Rogers.

The plot consists of a burning and temporarily thwarted romance between Rogers and the daughter of a socially ambitious mother. Helen (“Boop-boop-a-doop”) Kane is in it and there are some handsome yacht scenes. Most interesting shot—Buddy Rogers lighting a cigaret before the camera for the first time in his career.

Sinner’s Holiday (Warner). In a season in which many features, for no good reason, are being allowed to run over an hour and a half, Sinner’s Holiday has been compressed to 55 minutes. Concentration gives it pith; it tells its little story compactly and credibly. Although the action involves liquor-running and murder, it is less a picture of action than of character, made so by the skill of Lucille La Verne and James Cagney. She is the owner of a penny arcade, which she runs with an avarice only equaled by her devotion to bourgeois respectability and to her son, Cagney, a snivelling, dependent coward. Best shot—Evelyn Knapp getting pennies to be used by the arcade’s customers.

Up the River (Fox). Reputed to be a satire, this undecisive story about prison life contains such an odd combination of mildly funny and seriously romantic and even melodramatic sequences that the spectator is left wondering whether it is meant to satirize prison, or movies about prison, or satires of movies about prison.

Examples of its satire are:1) that the women’s wing of the prison is located so conveniently that one of the convicts has no difficulty initiating a love-affair with the best-looking female prisoner; 2) the escape of certain prisoners dressed as women, who get out to help a pal of theirs in trouble and come back as soon as their good deed is done. Only intentionally funny sequence—the baseball game between rival convict teams.

What a Widow (United Artists). This is a violent attempt to rouse laughter by an expenditure of physical energy. The attempt is a failure. One is surprised at first to see a film star so securely established as Gloria Swanson engaging in furious slapstick, but after the novelty has worn off the humor also disappears.

Part of the adventure takes place on a trans-Atlantic liner and part on the Dornier DO-X plane; through all of it the widow pursues tentatively hilarious adventures with various men. If the star overacted less, if the little plot moved with speed instead of confusion, What a Widow might be passable entertainment. As it stands, it will do little to support Gloria Swanson’s reputation as an entertainer. Best role—Gregory Gaye as a Russian violinist.

Just as a former plasterer who has be come a governor or a millionaire takes pleasure in showing his old deftness with the trowel, so Gloria Swanson deliberately chose slapstick as a reminder of her first period in pictures. Yet she was never good at being funny. She worked for Charlie Chaplin, but he fired her for being too particular about the stunts she undertook. She was chunky but handsome as a Mack Sennett bathing girl; she looked badly in costumes other than a bathing suit, and did not know how to do her hair. For three years she worked sullenly among custard pies until Cecil Blount De Mille promoted her to dramatic parts.

Some of the old comedies in which she worked with Chaplin, Sennett and her husband of that period, Wallace Beery*were Elvira Farina, Teddy at the Throttle, The Pullman Bride.

Her Man (Pathe). An anecdote about a romantic sailor, an entertainer in a waterfront cafe in Havana, and the proprietor of the cafe who takes a proprietary attitude toward the entertainer, might not promise much but Director Tay Garnett makes it all highly effective. The story has no connection with the song Fannie Brice used to sing, nor — though one of the principals is named Frankie and an other Johnny — with the bawdy U. S. folk song. It is a simple and realistic melo drama, excellently written in spite and perhaps because of its familiar outlines, and told in true moving-picture style, rapidly and visually, with the dialog occasionally coloring but never slowing up the flow of photographic images. Best shot — Mike Donlin, famed oldtime centre-fielder of the New York Giants, talking about the world series in his role of bar tender.

*Last week she was reported once more to be getting a divorce from the Marquis de la Falaise et de la Coudray, her third spouse. Other onetime Swanson spouse: Herbert Somborn, onetime president of Actors’ Equity.