Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 15, 1938

Alexander’s Ragtime Band (Twentieth Century-Fox) is a two-hour, $2,000,000 collection of songs by Composer Irving Berlin, played and sung against the background of a conventional screen libretto.

Any effort to abridge the works of Berlin into a single picture is doomed to failure by the sheer magnitude of the task, but this one comes as close to success as could be expected. As the most expensive anthology ever compiled, as an outline of the history of U. S. jazz and as the soundtrack record of a noisy era, it is easily the best cinemusical of 1938.

Israel Baline set out to demonstrate his exaggerated belief that it is better to write a country’s songs than its laws when he turned out the title piece of this film in 1911. Total of published Berlin songs is 600 of which ten percent have been hits.

According to Composer Berlin, his five most important songs were: Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Everybody Step (1921), What’ll I Do? (1924), A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody (1919), Cheek to Cheek (1935). Each supplied the working model for half-a-dozen others. The present film includes all five, runs through others—notably including When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’, Blue Skies, Remember, Marie, Heat Wave—at the rate of one for every year of the action.

To squeeze all of Berlin into one picture, Producer Darryl Zanuck was forced in Alexander’s Ragtime Band to fall back on the reliable pattern of youthful romance between a bandleader (Tyrone Power) and a singer (Alice Faye). Rule for all such romances is that the principals must not be united until the final sequence. The hero and heroine of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, separated by a lovers’ quarrel before the War, therefore cannot be reconciled until she has heard him conduct a somewhat overdecorated swing concert in Carnegie Hall in 1938. At the end, although she has long since married and divorced a pianist (Don Ameche) and he has whiled away the post-War decades with another singer (Ethel Merman), both look much younger than at their first meeting. However, in Alexander’s Ragtime Band the familiar, fragile, changing rhythms of the Berlin songs evoke a sense of time and change more cogently than any story could. Best shot: the soldier cast of a service benefit show, ordered to embark for France in the midst of a performance, marching off stage, up the aisles, and out of the theatre, to the tune of We’re On Our Way to France.

The Crowd Roars (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) continues MGM’s campaign to make Robert Taylor, Cinema’s No. 1 ladies’ man, acceptable to male cinemaddicts. The technique is simple. Not content with exhibiting its star as a guttersnipe prize fighter, The Crowd Roars shows him hobnobbing with such raffish characters as Lionel Stander, Frank Morgan, Nat Pendleton, William Gargan and Edward Arnold. Much of the time the classic symmetry of the Taylor profile is impaired by a rubber mouthpiece, and female cinemaddicts, who have found Taylor irresistible in drawing-room dramas, may find him almost unrecognizable in boxing gloves and shorts. Taylor appears in his customary guise in only one sequence—a dance at a young ladies’ seminary, at which he wears white tie & tails.

Even here he executes a nimble prize-ring shuffle while ducking a punch aimed at his head by his rival for the attentions of demure Maureen O’Sullivan.

In the story of The Crowd Roars— otherwise chiefly notable because the hero does not win a championship—ringwise cinemaddicts will detect interesting similarities to the careers of two famed contemporary fisticuffers: Gene Tunney and Max Baer. Like Baer, the hero of The Crowd Roars kills an adversary in the ring. Like Tunney, he reads the classics, speaks careful English and falls in love with a socialite. Smooth direction by Richard Thorpe and a tightly integrated narrative, for which major credit goes to Screenwriter George Bruce, weld these and the rest of the paraphernalia of all fight films—bigshot gamblers, fight fixers, snarling reporters—into racy, raucous entertainment, as insignificant and as lively as tomorrow’s sports page. Best characterization: Frank Morgan as the hero’s whiskey-soaked, lazy, conniving father, a onetime impresario of trained seals, who launches his son’s ring career in order to avoid the indignity of going to work as a ditchdigger.

The Texans (Paramount). Equipped with more manners and poise than most cinemactors, Randolph Scott is one of the few who have married heiresses. His wife, from whom he is separated, was Marian du Pont. When not in Hollywood he likes to attend swank horse shows and hunt races.

Unfortunately, Cinemactor Scott’s long upper lip and narrow eyes tend to give him the look of an uncouth frontier bumpkin.

Consequently, while his social inferiors are performing in tailor-made clothes amid de luxe surroundings, the sole cinema celebrity of the Virginia hunting set is compelled to earn his living in leggings, hide shirts and a Daniel Boone haircut.

In The Texans, Scott is found in better company than usual, with Joan Bennett as a belle of post-Civil War Texas, and May Robson as her doting grandmother, for his chief associates. The terrain, however, is far more suitable for coyotes than for foxes, and Cinemactor Scott’s closest approach to the atmosphere to which he is accustomed in his private life is supplied by a herd of 10,000 snuffling beef cattle which he and Miss Bennett drive up the Chisholm Trail, from the Rio Grande to Kansas.

Based on an original story by Emerson Hough (The Covered Wagon), rigged out with a full quota of blizzards, prairie fires, stampedes, cowboys, carpetbaggers and Comanche Indians, The Texans contains more than enough action for a grand scale brush country epic. That it fails to emerge

as such is probably due to the fact that most of the humans in the cast seem dispirited in comparison with the live stock.