Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 21, 1935

Biography of a Bachelor Girl (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Ann Harding does not suffer in this one. Instead, still copiously exuding sweetness, she is cast as an adventuress so notorious that reporters storm her cabin when she returns to the U. S., so impoverished that bailiffs immediately thereafter denude her studio of furniture, so dashing that Robert Montgomery, editor of a magazine called Every Week, is ready to pay $20,000 for her biography. Ghostwriting her memoirs, he endangers the career of Edward Everett Horton, candidate for the Senate. Horton will lose the election if Every Week reveals the part he played in Miss Harding’s early life. Montgomery and Harding go to a mountain cabin to finish the biography; Horton follows them; so does Una Merkel, the latter’s fiancée. By this time Montgomery and Harding are in love and the issue between them seems to be whether he is willing to give up his career for her.

Part of the trouble with Biography of a Bachelor Girl is that there is a great deal too much talk and part is Miss Harding’s womanly but determined bludgeoning of the role Ina Claire gaily aired on the Manhattan stage. Montgomery succeeds most of the time in keeping his celebrated winsomeness under control. When at literary work he wears a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with a Harold-Lloydish air. Funniest scene: Horton explaining why he cannot make an honest woman of Ann Harding.

Evergreen (Gaumont-British) is an adaptation of the Benn W. Levy musicomedy which charmed London audiences four years ago. It effectively introduces to U. S. cinemaddicts Jessie Matthews, a personable young actress who helped make that stage production so successful. Evergreen’s general excellence in almost all departments shows that British cinemanufacturers can rival Hollywood quite as successfully in musical films as they have, during the past year, in every other field.

Conforming to Hollywood standards in settings, songs (mostly by Rodgers & Hart), dances and costumes. Evergreen even has a backstage plot. It shows its heroine, the ambitious daughter of a retired stage favorite, becoming a star by pretending to be her mother. The impersonation, carried on to the detriment of her own intrigue with a young press agent and to the feverish anxiety of her stage manager (Sonnie Hale), ends when, on a gala opening night, she removes her white wig and does a modern dance routine which first alarms, then enchants her audience.

The Rodgers & Hart melodies (“When You’ve Got a Little Springtime In Your Heart,” “Over My Shoulder Goes Care,” “Dancing on the Ceiling”) sound infinitely better than their titles. Miss Matthews sings and dances to them as gracefully as they deserve. The only really weak spots in Evergreen are its happily infrequent efforts to be comic. Sample: The heroine to her scapegrace father: “Do you mind if I open the window?” His reply: “No, but don’t give me the air.”

Jessie Matthews, currently the most popular young musicomedienne in London, is 27, tall, brunette and possessed of banjo-eyes and the best publicized legs in England. Her father was a tailor. Her brother, Billy, was a fisticuffer who claimed the lightweight championship of Europe. At 15 Jessie Matthews left school to become a chorus girl in the London edition of Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue, has since appeared mostly in Charles B. Cochran productions. She visited the U.S. in the chorus of two Chariot Revues, appeared in Earl Carroll’s Vanities, starred in Wake Up and Dream. Her present husband is John Robert Hale-Monro (“Sonnie Hale”). They were married in 1931 after Sonnie Hale was divorced by Actress Evelyn Laye and Jessie Matthews was divorced by her first husband, Actor Henry Lytton Jr., following her voluntary testimony of her own adultery with Actor Hale. She likes riding, plays good tennis, dances three or four hours daily.

The Wandering Jew (Twickenham) presents the cavernous countenance of Conrad Veidt in four different makeups, representing four phases of the tedious life of that legendary Jew who made one of the worst guesses on record. In Jerusalem, Veidt is a rich Jew with a sick wife whom he asks Christ to heal. To his vexation the Messiah (off screen) suggests that he return the woman to the man from whom he stole her. As Christ goes to be crucified, the Jew curses and spits at Him. Condemned to wander the earth, Veidt next turns up during the Crusades. He jousts with one knight, attempts to seduce another’s wife, is rebuffed. The Jew reappears as a Sicilian merchant whose son dies and whose wife leaves him to become a nun. Lastly, in Seville, he is a kindly doctor who treats a trollop’s injured ankle, involuntarily saves her soul. When the Inquisition hales him up as a heretic, the Jew flays the Church for being unChristian, is condemned to burn. The facts that the flames do not harm him, that he dies spontaneously in a sudden glow of light, make it obvious that the Jew is redeemed.

The Night Is Young (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This pallid operetta deals heavily with a princeling’s love for a commoner. The Austrian emperor’s nephew and heir (Ramon Novarro) is enamored of a big-eyed, winsome ballet dancer (Evelyn Laye), hired to cover his dalliance with a countess. Duty demands that he marry a princess and in the end he does so but not before he and the dancer spend an apparently comfortable night on top of a Ferris wheel.

Actors Laye and Novarro sing pleasant but unremarkable Sigmund Romberg-Oscar Hammerstein II songs, one of which begins: “There’s a riot in Havana, a famine in Tibet, a quake in Yokohama. …” The Night Is Young would probably be less dull if Edward Everett Horton and Charles Butterworth were given more elbowroom for their dependable buffooneries. Driving Miss Laye through the streets in a pouring rain, Butterworth sneezes, says, “Well, the suspense is over now—I know I’m catching cold.”

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer has been in production ever since Paramount bought Major Francis Yeats-Brown’s best-selling autobiography four years ago. Director Ernest Schoedsack (Grass, Chang) went to India, spent $200,000 on background shots of which 100 ft. appear in the finished picture. Almost every writer on Paramount’s list had a hand in writing the adaptation. The original cast was changed so frequently that only two of its members—Gary Cooper and Sir Guy Standing—function in the finished version. Director Henry Hathaway, an obscure specialist in “Westerns” who had given up directing in disgust, was recalled to direct the picture. When Paramount finally got down to work, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was made in 88 working days, mostly on location within 50 miles of Hollywood. Four thousand actors performed in it at one time or another. It cost about $1,300,000. Strangely enough, the time and money were well spent. In its finished form, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer is precisely what it should be, a rich and engrossing melodrama, concerned with heroism, pigsticking, torture chambers, spies and the White Man’s Burden, which should delight all occidental audiences and infuriate Mahatma Gandhi.

Captain McGregor (Gary Cooper) is a hardbitten, warm-hearted soldier. Lieut. Forsythe (Franchot Tone) is a flip Oxonian, with good manners and a lionheart. Lieut. Stone (Richard Cromwell) is the tenderfoot son of the stern regimental commander (Sir Guy Standing). The three engage in sport and pleasant banter until a rascally potentate kidnaps young Stone and the other two attempt to rescue him. When the potentate puts lighted bamboo splinters under McGregor’s finger nails, he makes a face but tells no secrets. Neither does Forsythe, but flabby Stone despicably reveals the whereabouts of a British ammunition train. The result is a terrific battle in which McGregor dies, Forsythe gets wounded and young Stone redeems himself.

When The Lives of a Bengal Lancer last week had its Manhattan premiere, critics unanimously acclaimed it with all the adjectives at their command. Admirers of Author Yeats-Brown will find it as faithful to the spirit of his book as it is faithless to the text. Good shot: Lieut. Forsythe discovering that the squeakings of a reed flute, which he plays to annoy Captain McGregor, have attracted the unfavorable attention of a cobra.

The Unfinished Symphony (Gaumont-British) is a highly romanticized explanation of why Composer Franz Schubert never completed his famed Symphony in B Minor. Historically, he wrote it in 1822, two years before he became music teacher to Caroline Countess Esterhazy, with whom he may have been in love. According to this picture, Schubert (Hans Jaray) actually finished the symphony, tore up the end of it out of chagrin at seeing Pupil Caroline (Marta Eggerth) married off to a Hungarian nobleman.

Audiences for whom this sentimental fiction lacks the charm that might have excused its improbability, are likely to enjoy its score, including the Schubert melodies “Ave Maria,” “Serenade,” “Rosamunde.” Good shot: Fräulein Eggerth (a cheerful blonde soprano, due next month to work in Hollywood) hitting high C in “Serenade.”