Cinema: The New Pictures Nov. 3, 1930

Maybe It’s Love (Warner). That famous cinema college, dear old Upton, faces a crisis in this football story. At the moment when it is the fourth down and one minute to play the crisis is successfully dealt with. Besides such picture-people as Joan Bennett and James Hall, the cast is distinguished by the presence of an “All-American” football team of 1929, including Racehorse Russell Saunders of the University of Southern California. It contains some fairly funny gags and is in general light-hearted enough to make a pleasant program show Best shot: the All-Americans practicing.

Billy the Kid (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Undoubtedly the new vogue of westerns has been stimulated by critics who arraigned the cinema for losing its integrity in dull photographs of stage plays. Now King Wallis Vidor, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s ace director, with the help of the company’s best dialog writers, Laurence Stallings and Charles MacArthur, has deliberately turned back to the old westerns as models in an attempt to reproduce the virtues that have reappeared only occasionally in pictures since the western became outmoded—speed, action, outdoor settings, and the suspense of the greatest and simplest of all plots: flight and pursuit. They have arranged this show from episodes taken from the life of Billy the Kid, famed oldtime western Robin Hood. The sheriff who idolizes the man he is chasing, the pure and lovely young girl who sticks to Billy through his dangers, the villains who are nasty simply because it is their nature to be so, are all properly represented. Their activities are photographed on a big screen which is supposed to add the elusive “third dimension” for which producers have been experimenting so eagerly, but which is simply a big screen. Some of the sequences in which John Mack Brown drawls through the role of Billy are effective, many of them are absurd, and in general Billy the Kid lacks the gusto it tries so hard to borrow from its models. It is a stiff, ornamental, unsuccessful imitation of a picture form which, since it made no concessions to realism, was originally pure and entrancing fable. Best shot: Wallace Beery smoking the starving outlaw out of his cave by cooking bacon where he can smell it.

The Santa Fe Trail (Paramount). This is another western, beautifully photographed, nicely acted, but static and thoroughly dull as entertainment. Taken from Hal G. Evart’s Saturday Evening Post serial, Spanish Acres, it is in effect a long argument as to whether some sheep owned by a U. S. boy are to be grazed on land owned by a gullible Spanish rancher. Richard Arlen is the hero, Rosita Moreno is the rancher’s daughter. One element of comic relief is the occasional intrusion of a young boy and girl who have the fearful coyness inevitable in camera-trained children under twelve.

War Nurse (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). This picture fails in many ways to do justice to its theme—the woman’s side of the War—yet it is a courageous and fairly honest effort. The picture of mental and physical conditions at the great French base-hospitals is restrained in comparison with the descriptions of such conditions that have been current, verbally and in writing, since the Armistice. Nevertheless, audiences who saw the first showings of War Nurse last week frequently laughed at the wrong times. Audiences can absorb visible violence only up to a definite saturation point, after which they overflow into the only available reaction—laughter. But if the violence is presented through the brain of some character, in whose place the audience can stand, there is no saturation point. As a loose-jointed account of how life went on for a group of girls just behind the Front, War Nurse convinces, yet it is only superficially, and therefore at times offensively, gruesome. Just one moment like that in All Quiet on the Western Front, when the soldier whose leg has been amputated complains of a pain in his toe, would have justified much of inexperienced Director Edgar Selwyn’s blood, sentimentality and synthetic thunder. Anita Page, Robert Montgomery, Robert Ames and June Walker are in it. Best shot: the officers’ party. Silliest shot: the advent of Anita Page’s baby.

Three years ago blonde Anita Page, who in spite of an unsympathetic part plays at least on even terms with the stage-experienced brunette, June Walker,* was the prettiest girl in Washington Irving High School. Her father had an electrical contracting business in Murray Hill, Flushing, L. I. Through her girlhood Anita Pomares took the bus to school and talked about being an actress. Her father had done some lighting work for a studio in Astoria and knew somebody who promised to do what he could for Anita. Her first screen name was Anita Rivers. After the company she signed with had disbanded in California she took a screen test for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer which was successful. The company thought Anita Page sounded better. Now her father, mother and little brother live with her. She goes to bed early.

*June Walker, although only 31, has been trouping for 13 years. This is not, as commonly supposed, her first picture. She made one for the old Essanay Co.