Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 9, 1933

Ann Vickers (RKO-Radio). Sinclair Lewis’ story of a woman social worker is satisfactory material for the cinema. As adapted by Jane Murfin it briefly shows Ann Yickers (Irene Dunne) at the start of her career, coolly fencing off the admiration of a clownish confrère and a suave young barrister (Conrad Nagel). It deals more comprehensively with her wartime love affair with Captain Resnick (Bruce Cabot). After these preliminary romances and Ann’s brief, unhappy experience as a prison-executive, the picture launches enthusiastically into the matter of her liaison with Judge Barney Dolphin (Walter Huston).

Here, precisely where he might most easily have become sensational, sentimental or merely tasteless, Director John Cromwell handled his material most competently. Judge Dolphin’s indictment, his sentence to six years at hard labor, Ann Vickers’ determination to have his child, are handled, not in the lurid manner which they might have suggested to a less conscientious director, but with almost too much dignity. At the end of the picture, when Judge Dolphin is pardoned, Ann says she is out of prison too — the prison of ambition for a selfish success. Tying the story up with this platitude does not seriously weaken what has preceded it — an intelligent study, over-solemn but affecting, of a mature woman at work and in love.

Convinced by Mary Stevens M .D. and this production that the main problem of the professional woman is finding last names for her children, Hollywood may be expected to furnish a plethora of pictures about ladies in the newer professions. If actresses of as much talent and understanding as Irene Dunne can be found to act in them, the cycle should be more commendable than the current investigation of the farm problem (see p. 33).

Footlight Parade (Warner). The cinemusicomedy as developed by Warner Brothers is exceedingly simple. It consists of assembling dancers in as many improbable patterns as possible, photographing them from unexpected angles. In this one, the chorus warms up on a few simple circles, live-pointed stars and sprocket wheels, shot from above. The novelty lies in having the chorus swim and pose in an extraordinary pool backed by a combined waterfall and diving-platform. While still immersed, Warners’ geometrical water-babies arrange themselves further into formations resembling a caterpillar unfolding its legs, a zipper-fastener opening & closing. On dry land they conduct their usual gyrations on a flat stage,on glittering pedestals and in a cafe where Ruby Keeler, in Chinese makeup, does a tap dance on a bar. Although the cinema code has not yet been signed, Hollywood productions, wherever possible, contain compliments for the NRA. In Footlight Parade, a line of marching soldiers fades irrelevantly into a U. S. flag. The flag fades into a portrait study of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The sailors then assemble themselves in the shape of a lopsided eagle. Most of the mass-maneuvers in Footlight Parade only remotely resemble dances but they are sufficiently bizarre—in many cases, pretty—to be worth watching. They also provide suspense for Warner Brothers next cinemusicomedy because it is hard to imagine what tricks Director Busby Berkeley can do with his performers next, unless he chops them into pieces.

This problem may have suggested the plot of Footlight Parade, about a dunce director who has a hard time thinking up new routines, finds that his rival promptly steals them. The novelty in the backstage romance in Footlight Parade consists in having it occur not in the wings of a theatre hut in a cinema studio where James Cagney is the dance director, Joan Blondell his affectionate secretary, Ruby Keeler his star tap-dancer, Dick Powell his best juvenile, Guy Kibbee his fenag-ling partner. Philip Faversham, son of famed William Faversham who was a matinee idol 30 years ago, has a bit, his second cinema part, as a frightened hoofer. The developments leading up to the dances and the NRA take too long and the line of rehearsing dancers which is their unvarying background grows monotonous; otherwise Footlight Parade is a good sample of its type. Songs: “Honeymoon Hotel,” “Shanghai Lil,” “By a Waterfall.”

The Bowery (Twentieth Century). For his first production since leaving Warner Brothers last spring, Darryl Zanuck did what any smart producer might have tried but what very few could have carried off. From the sad look that comes into Wallace Beery’s piggish eyes when he examines Jackie Cooper, to the sofa-pillow figure popularized by Mae West. Zanuck put in practically everything that cinema audiences have particularly patronized for the last two years. As a framework, he had Howard Estabrook and James Gleason fabricate a picaresque story about rival saloonkeepers on Manhattan’s famed Bowery, just before the war with Spain.

Chuck Connors (Wallace Beery) is a loud, muddleheaded, arrogant publican, proud of his door-knob derby hat and the biggest barroom on the Bowery. He dis trusts women, entertains a sentimental regard for a waif called Swipes (Jackie Cooper) whose favorite pastime is throwing stones through the windows of a Chinese laundry. Steve Brodie (George Raft ) is a different type of Bowery sport, a sleek, rakish gambling man, envious of Connors’ prestige. When Connors befriends a respectable girl (Fay Wray) to the extent of letting her be his cook, slick Brodie promptly makes her his fiancée. When Connors gives little Swipes a spanking which causes him to run away, Brodie gives him a home. Still, Steve Brodie has no saloon. When two brewers offer to give him one if he can acquire a following, he thinks up the scheme of jumping off Brooklyn Bridge. His wager with Connors is a fine funeral against Connors’ barroom. Brodie wins the bet. Chuck Connors thinks he did it dishonestly, gives him a thrashing on an East River barge. The Bowery ends with a reconciliation between Connors and Brodie. They are off to Cuba together, with Swipes concealed in the rumble seat of a gun-wagon.

There is great good humor and nonchalance in the way Raoul Walsh directed The Bowery. It is a gay cartoon of a place and a period, as flagrant as a copy of the Police Gazette and as forthright as a set of brass knuckles. Good shot: a terrific fight with ashcans, fists, brickbats, blackjacks, between Chuck Connors’ fire company and Steve Brodie’s, while the hopeless Chinese in a burning tenement squeal for help.

Twentieth Century is the first important new producing company formed in Hollywood in four years. It is a direct result of last spring’s bank holiday and the consequent studio shutdown. When all Hollywood employes were on half-salary or less in March, Production Chief Darryl Francis Zanuck of Warner Brothers promised his underlings to restore their pay on the date set by the Cinema Academy.

When President Harry Warner countermanded his order, Producer Zanuck resigned (TIME, May 1). A sharp-faced little man with a rasping voice, abnormal quantities of almost hysterical energy and a wildly eccentric sense of humor, Zanuck’s reputation in Hollywood was founded on his skill in handling the realism that has been cinema’s most noteworthy development since talkies. Unsympathetic to drawing room comedy, Cinderella romance, mechanical spectacle or pure pornography, Producer Zanuck likes to deal lightheartedly with episodic scenarios about lively, colorful plebeians—with James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, William Powell impersonating taxi-drivers, reporters, gamblers, shysters. When Zanuck left Warners, Producer Joe Schenck, who recently has been interested in horse racing at Agua Caliente, furnished Zanuck with cash to produce his pictures at United Artists’ studio (like Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr.). Suspected of intending a campaign of “star-raiding,” Producer Zanuck has so far managed to borrow or buy in the open market all the talent he has needed. On Twentieth Century’s current payroll are: Constance Bennett, Loretta Young, George Arliss, Constance Cummings, George Bancroft, Judith Anderson, Sally Blane. Tullio Carminati. Forthcoming Twentieth Century pictures: Broadway Through a Keyhole, Moulin Rouge, Advice to the Lovelorn, House of Rothschild, Gentlemen, the King!, The Great Barnum.

Golden Harvest (Paramount) like many another Hollywood problem play, tries earnestly to take sides on a controversial question without offending anyone. A well-to-do wheat farmer has two sons. One of them, Walt Martin (Richard Arlen) stays at home, marries a neighbor’s daughter, begets twins and tours his fields happily in a tractor. Walt’s older brother Chris (Chester Morris) goes to Chicago, makes a fortune speculating in wheat, marries the egotistical daughter (Genevieve Tobin) of the richest speculator in the Pit. When wheat prices go down and foreclosed mortgages—without which even a problem play about a farm would be incomplete—begin to hurt the Martin farm, Chris and Walt have ugly words.

Instead of building up its case against speculation, Golden Harvest at this point launches a fantastic compromise. Walt Martin organizes a farmers’ strike. Chris cooperates by using his knowledge of the strike to boom wheat prices on the exchange. The farm strike collapses in time to bankrupt him. In its effort to give an appearance of having proved something, Walt Martin is shown telling a group of financiers that the next farm strike will be more serious, and Mrs. Chris Martin seems to have grown more fond of her husband. A few good bits of wheat-farming local color—a “shivaree” at the wedding of the Martins’ hired help, an auction at a foreclosed farm—are the only shots in Golden Harvest that really possess the sincerity to which the rest of the picture pretends.