Cinema: The New Pictures: Mar. 20, 1939

Love Affair (RKO Radio). Leo Mc-Carey, who directed this picture, is one of Los Angeles’ few major contributions to the cinema industry’s personnel. Son of a sports promoter named Thomas (“Uncle Tom”) McCarey, he went to U. S. C., studied law, played on the rugby team. After college, Leo McCarey tried work in a San Francisco law office, quit to tour the Orpheum circuit as a boxer, did pick-&-shovel work in Montana mines, returned to Hollywood, where a chance meeting with Director Tod Browning got him into the cinema industry. That was in 1918. Two years later, McCarey got a job as gag man and writer for Hal Roach which he held for a decade. In 1933 he went to Paramount, earned a place as one of the industry’s top-notch directors with Ruggles of Red Gap, Make Way for Tomorrow. In 1937 The Awful Truth won him the Academy Prize for direction, an RKO contract as producerdirector, of which Love Affair is the first result.

Difference between a mere director and a producer-director is that a director’s ideas about cinemanufacture are subject to discussion, modification, veto by his producer, but a producer-director is edited by no one but himself. In addition to credit for producing and directing Love Affair, McCarey gets credit, with Mildred Cram, for the original story. As close to a one-man show as any $850,000 picture can be, Love Affair is pleasantly free from the assembly-belt characteristics that mar many . Hollywood products. It also exhibits the need for the merciless editing that few directors are masochistic enough to give their own work.

Concerned with nothing more than the romantic meeting and somewhat prolonged courtship of a European fortune hunter (Charles Boyer) and a Kansas-bred nightclub singer (Irene Dunne), it frequently falters in pace. It also includes a few sequences which, reminiscent of Director McCarey’s work for Hal Roach, are among the most adroit cinematic touches of the year. Good shot: Irene Dunne, prevented from getting married to Boyer when a car cripples her legs, waking up to fave the consequences in a hospital.

The Oklahoma Kid (Warner Bros.). Westerns have always been a Hollywood staple. Lately, partly because of the success of Gene Autry and the Hopalong Cassidy series, partly because there is no other type of picture calculated to give so little offense to foreign countries, they have enjoyed a spectacular renaissance. Minor producers who make low-budget Westerns in dozen lots are turning out more than ever. Major producers, inclined to disdain Westerns for the past few years, have not only resumed making them but promoted them to high production budgets.

Already on view are Let Freedom Ring and Stagecoach. In production are Union Pacific, Dodge City and The Return of The Cisco Kid. Projected by the Marx Brothers is an epic entitled Go West, which will aim to end the cycle by burlesquing it. In The Oklahoma Kid, the current vogue of the Western is dramatically exemplified by the fact that in it James Cagney, whose cinema career has taken him as far toward the great open spaces as gangsters’ hideouts, appears equipped with sombrero, cowboy suit, lasso and two remarkably effective hoss pistols.

Produced from an original story by Edward Paramore Jr. and Wally Klein, The Oklahoma Kid is a highly engaging fable about extralegal activities accompanying the settlement of the Cherokee strip and the city of Tulsa, Okla. circa 1893. Right-minded citizens of Tulsa may resent having their city’s history portrayed principally in terms of a personal feud between the Oklahoma Kid (Cagney) and an unscrupulous saloon-poker-hall and brothel-keeper named Whip McCord (Humphrey Bogart). Cinemaddicts with a less special interest in the subject will find it satisfactory on this account. Typical shot: Cagney—whose Bowery accent lends an admirably exotic touch to his impersonation of a badlands sharpshooter—blowing complacently through his pistol barrel when he shoots someone.

The Little Princess (Twentieth Century-Fox). In her four years as world’s top box-office star, Shirley Temple has had more influence on female styles than anyone since Irene Castle. Five million Shirley Temple dolls have been sold since 1936. In 1935, hair ribbons for small girls were obsolete. Since then, 20,000,000 little girls have acquired Shirley Temple bows. Flatto Ribbon Mills Corp., which manufactures them, has ordered 5,000,000 more to meet demands which dealers anticipate will be created by this picture.

In The Little Princess, described by Darryl Zanuck as “the finest motion picture with which I have ever been associated,” Shirley, who will be 10 next month, appears in a full-length Technicolor for the first time, wiggles and gurgles familiarly as the daughter of a British captain besieged at Mafeking in the Anglo-Boer War. Most inevitable shot: the little princess waving at old Queen Victoria.