Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 14, 1931

Blonde Crazy (Warner) shows a few of the tricks whereby an enterprising bellhop, equipped with light lingers and curly hair, can live handsomely on his wits. The bellhop (James Cagney) is so much interested in dishonesty that he keeps a scrapbook of variations of the badger game, methods of stealing diamond bracelets, false money transactions and likely methods of beating persons who think they can beat the races. By the practice of these wiles, he manages to keep luxurious quarters in the best hotels, preying mostly upon persons no more honest but less versatile than himself. But he is an over-confident confidence man. His one act of outright burglary—the theft of the diamond bracelet—finally has bad consequences. Detectives corner him in his rooms, chase him down a street in automobiles, shoot him with a machine gun. He is last seen in jail, making sentimental overtures to his blonde partner (Joan Blondell).

This conclusion serves the purposes of law & order. It is not in keeping with the rest of the picture, which is a chipper, hardboiled, amusing essay on petty thievery. In his first starring performance, James Cagney has a role in which he is more mischievous than wicked. He makes rascality seem both easy and attractive as he did in The Public Enemy and Smart Money, two previous works by Authors Kubec Glasmon and John Bright who wrote Blonde Crazy. Good shot: Cagney casting hungry glances at the female patrons of a nightclub.

James Cagney was born over a saloon owned and run by his father in a Manhattan slum. By the time he reached high school he had started that series of heterogeneous occupations which occur painfully at the outset of many a cinematic career. He was a copy boy for the New York Sun; a department store bundle-wrapper; a librarian; a neophyte painter. He left Columbia University to be a chorus boy. From this traditionally effeminate occupation, he presently was graduated to vaudeville, musical comedy (Grand Street Follies)., legitimate plays (Women Go on Forever and Outside Looking In for which he was selected because he had red hair). His 1930 performance, opposite Joan Blondell, in Penny Arcade, got him to Hollywood, which, since talkies, has been the final up-step for an actor’s progress. Noted for his impersonations of unscrupulous and philandering heroes, he is less airy when out of the camera’s eye. Recently in a Hollywood cafe he was roundly cuffed by Mrs. James Cagney for looking at another lady. Last autumn he won a celebrated salary argument with Warner Brothers. This is his first starring picture.

Frankenstein (Universal). Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs. Percy Bysshe Shelley) wrote this story, supposedly to win a bet from her husband and Lord Byron. It is a grisly conceit about a young doctor who, experimenting with synthetic animation, produces a live, dangerous and somewhat human monster. Universal, encouraged by the success of Dracula to produce a series of horrific weirds, in which Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue will be next, entrusted the direction of Frankenstein to James Whale. He did it in the Grand Guignol manner, with as many queer sounds, dark corners, false faces and cellar stairs as could possibly be inserted.

The doctor’s laboratory is amazingly macabre. It is situated in a cavernous windmill on top of a small mountain. Having infused life into his monster by hoisting him up to the ceiling on an operating table, causing electricity to crackle from all quarters, the doctor (Colin Clive) is stupid enough to leave him in the basement with an inadequate guard. The monster (played by Boris Karloff, who wears a square skull, tubes in his neck, scarred wrists, thick-eyelids and an immobile expression) throttles an assistant doctor who is trying to anesthetize him, stumbles angrily away from his operating table, escapes from the mill. After ravaging the country side, he assaults the doctor’s fiancee (Mae Clarke) on the morning of her wedding day. Finally there is a monster-hunt by night, in which a whole township and several noisy dogs take part. The monster, squeaking and grunting, is burned to death in the mill.

Good shot: Karloff sitting down with a little girl, later shown as a corpse, to play with flowers.

At a preview in Chicago, 27-year-old Inventor Leonarde Keeler tried out on two members of the audience his “Lie-Detector” which police have found handy for questioning recalcitrant suspects. The ‘”Lie-Detector” is a device which, by means of arm and chest bands, records on a paper chart changes in blood pressure and pulse action, presumably resulting from emotion. At last week’s test, it worked so well when attached to two De Paul University students that Inventor Keeler said: “The results are . . . even more pronounced than in many cases in which suspects are being questioned in connection with murders.”

Likewise pleased was Universal’s publicity department and Universal’s General Sales Manager Phil Reisman, who saw in the “Lie-Detector” a mechanical means of forecasting the efficacy of mechanical entertainment. Said he: “Instead of the old hit or miss previews we can now know exactly the emotional effect of any film, can cut out the ‘dead’ spots, and generally improve the pictures distributed.” A live spot in Frankenstein as revealed by the “Lie-Detector”: one in which the ugly face of Frankenstein’s dwarfish assistant pops up from behind a graveyard fence. Dead spots: the reappearance of the dwarf’s face in subsequent scenes when familiarity has made it less frightening.

Arrowsmith (United Artists-Samuel Goldwyn) is a faithful and brilliant facsimile of what most critics consider Sinclair Lewis’ best novel. Compressed to two hours, the story of young Dr. Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) starts when he meets Leora Tozer (Helen Hayes), proposes marriage when they are sitting in a cheap restaurant near a mechanical piano. The story continues in South Dakota, where Arrowsmith tries to practice medicine, cures cows as a sideline. Arrow-smith’s sojourn at an elaborate research institute—where Author Lewis reverted to his familiar flair for making fools of characters who were fools to begin with—is telescoped a little, but the magnificent climax—when Arrowsmith goes to the West Indies to fight bubonic plague—is more impressive, because more explicit, in pictures than in print. In the West Indies, Arrowsmith’s friend Sondelius (Richard Bennett) dies, wishing he could have one more drink. Leora dies too, while Arrowsmith is away inoculating natives against plague and making friends with a lady who, in the picture, does not become his second wife. Arrowsmith comes home to tell Gottlieb, who started him on his career as a scientist, that he has broken his promise to experiment on the natives, been contemptibly humane.

Director John Ford avoided the cinematic equivalent of fine writing which usually attaches itself to such ambitious reproductions. Ronald Colman’s British accent and pleat-waisted trousers do not fit Arrowsmith’s Midwest origins but his performance is valid in other respects. The magnificently, minutely true characterization which Helen Hayes gives to Leora is one of the events of the year. Good shots: rats, outlined in fire, leaving a burning brush village; Leora’s reply to Arrowsmith’s proffer of marriage: “Have you got a nickel? I want soft music.”