Cinema: The New Pictures: Apr. 9, 1934

Wild Cargo (RKO) makes Frank Buck’s life work of collecting animals for zoos appear to be a sinecure. When Buck sits down to rest in a Malay jungle he knows at once what causes each and every noise. “The East Indian binturong,” says he, ”is a strange creature, half-bear, half-cat.” Presently the binturong is laughing in a cage. When Frank Buck pitches a camp, white monkeys swarm on the roof. When he looks at a tree, there is a leopard in it. When a friendly potentate gives him a pig for Thanksgiving dinner, a python crawls halfway into the pig’s pen, eats the pig, finds itself trapped. To catch langur monkeys, he makes a one-inch hole in a coconut shell, puts rice inside. The monkey can reach into the shell but can not withdraw its closed paw with the rice.

Only a few of the larger animals give Frank Buck occasional trouble. This picture shows him dancing uneasily around a cobra, escaped from its crate; herding wild elephants into a corral; scooping a man-eating tiger out of a hole in the ground; catching a leopard in a snare. Other animals which appear in Wild Cargo are flying foxes, water buffalo, mouse-deer, gibbons, orangutans, tapirs. Most appealing are a white Rhesus monkey and a honey bear engaged in a calm, incompetent wrestling bout; most alarming, the python who slithers forlornly through Wild Cargo, strangling a black panther, frightening a mouse-deer, biting Frank Buck. The python ends in a cage as does an Indian rhinoceros whose capture, when he has eluded Buck’s wire corral and stumbled foolishly into a water hole, forms the climax of the picture.

Purporting to be a photographic record of the latest Buck expedition to gather a shipload of creatures for the St. Louis Zoo, Wild Cargo is hardly more than an adroitly staged, carefully written continuation of Bring ‘Em Back Alive. As a wild animal act, its realistic background gives it its chief advantage over a circus. But it makes Buck’s profession seem at once too exciting and too simple. Forty-year-old son of Texas parents who ran a covered wagon station in Texas, he started his career by catching birds and snakes with a bolas (which he uses on the cassowary in Wild Cargo). Since then he has crossed the Pacific 40 times, made five trips around the world, knocked out an orangutan in a fist fight. At Singapore, he maintains a completely stocked base for his expeditions. Throughout the Malay Peninsula he has native scouts who report to him the unexpected appearance of any rare or curious creature from the deep jungle. In Manhattan, where he has a handsome apartment in the Park Central Hotel, he keeps no pets of any kind.

This Man is Mine (RKO). In this display of misery at the country club, Irene Dunne is a smug painter married to a bovine playboy (Ralph Bellamy). When she makes a picture of three trees standing on a hillside to symbolize themselves and their small son, he resumes an old romance with a handsome young divorcée (Constance Cummings). This leads to adjustments in which 1) Ralph Bellamy punches Constance Cummings; 2) Irene Dunne smashes a picture frame on Ralph Bellamy.

This Man is Mine is a pipsqueak problem play afflicted with banality and complications. Typical speech (Bellamy to Cummings): “You and I belong to each other.”

Jimmy the Gent (Warner Brothers) presents James Cagney as a semi-respectable racketeer, a shyster who tracks down unclaimed estates, producing fake heirs for them and pocketing fat commissions. The fact that he is technically a lawyer does not prevent Jimmy Corrigan from being tough, excitable and addicted to kicking his hirelings. But he aspires to gentility when he beholds the glittering offices of his competitor Walsingham (Alan Dinehart), who is more sanctimonious about his trade but no less shifty. Corrigan’s onetime assistant (Bette Davis) has switched to Walsingham because she believes him honest. Sprucing up his office, Corrigan sets about confounding his rival, after mollifying him by presenting him the dossier of a $200,000 case. Legal-minded cinemagoers may wonder why judges, juries and district attorneys should be taken in by Corrigan’s tricks, through the loopholes of which could be tossed volumes and volumes of Blackstone. But Jimmy the Gent, hard and amusing, is no more incredible than a racket picture should be. Good shot: Cagney and colleagues drilling “you-alls” and “yas-suhs” into an Eastsider who is to impersonate an heir to an Atlanta fortune.

Riptide (MGM). Lord Rexford (Herbert Marshall), hero of this picture, meets its heroine, Mary Wendell (Norma Shearer) while he is dressed in the horns and antennae of a water beetle. She is costumed as a June bug. Disgusted with these artificial garments, they remove them and behave accordingly.

Unfortunately, this initial incident is more amusing and more true than what follows. Mary becomes Lady Rexford, mother of a three-year-old and mistress of a London mansion. Lord Rexford turns out a gloomier playmate than he first seemed. He expresses adoration for his wife with indigestive grunts and coddles his daughter by saying “Such a very red little rose.” When he goes to the U. S. on business, Lady Rexford goes to Cannes for pleasure. There she meets Tommy Trent (Robert Montgomery), who is as whimsical as her husband but less serious. A riptide of elvish jollity sets in. Tommy Trent and Lady Rexford go swimming in their evening clothes, kiss each other wrapped in blankets, drink cocktails in the moonlight. When Trent tries to climb into Lady Rexford’s hotel room he falls and breaks his head.

Back from the U. S., Lord Rexford has seen this escapade reported in the tabloids and he is swamped by morbid jealousy. By the time he is ready to believe that Trent, at the time of the mishap, was coming in, not going out, Lady Rexford and Trent have really sandwiched in some misconduct between sittings at backgammon. A divorce action occurs but when the picture ends, Lord and Lady Rexford are eyeing each other hungrily again.

A year and a half ago, Norma Shearer’s wiry little husband, Irving Thalberg, considered Hollywood’s No. 1 producer, suffered the nervous breakdown which for his profession is almost an occupational disease. After Miss Shearer finished Smilin’ Through she and Producer Thalberg went to Europe together, visited Italy, France, took the cure at Bad Nauheim, rested at Cannes, golfed in Scotland. Fully recovered when he returned last August, Producer Thalberg finally found it possible to effect his old plan of giving his personal attention to a dozen or so pictures a year, instead of supervising MGM’s whole schedule of 45 or 50.

Written and directed by Edmund Goulding, Riptide is not a good advertisement for the Thalberg plan. It is an anecdote with elephantiasis, glossy but erroneous, in which the story is less help than hindrance to the three best drawing-room actors in Hollywood. Typical line, Montgomery to Shearer, when he meets her at Cannes: “Whither thou goest, beautiful lady, so will I follow on. . . .”